Access to info under P-Noy

Our latest report reveals a mixed picture of progress and regress in how 27 national agencies are dealing with requests for access to information and asset disclosure records of senior public officials since President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III came to power nearly a year ago. He had, after all, signed and sealed his campaign for the presidency with a pledge to fulfill his “Social Contract with the Filipino People” and to uphold transparency, accountability, and good governance.

But a PCIJ audit over the last seven months of the access to information to Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN) of senior government officials yield results that surprise and disappoint at the same time.

In these agencies – including the Office of the President, the constitutional commissions, the Office of the Vice President, the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Armed Forces, the Philippine National Police, and departments collecting revenues and managing big budgets and big contracts – some pockets of transparency have opened up. However, most everywhere else, a predilection for opaqueness lingers and more barriers to access have been imposed.

Indeed, because Mr. Aquino’s testimonials to transparency have only been verbalized and not operationalized, drift and confusion mark the access to information regime across the bureaucracy today. While a few agencies stand out as exemplars of transparency, the majority remain stuck in the old ways of opaque government, with some even sliding back into darker corners.

To the last set belong the Office of the President and the nation’s top integrity office, the Office of the Ombudsman. The two stick out in the PCIJ audit as the most barren fields for harvesting information and documents, particularly on the wealth of senior public officials.

To audit the processes and practices that agencies employ in dealing with pleas for information, the PCIJ filed 35 requests for copies of the SALNs, personal data sheets (PDS) or curriculum vitae, and for some agencies, specific documents and data sets.

A total of 45 request letters were faxed or delivered to the agencies, and in all cases assisted by a total of 149 follow-up calls to the agencies made by the PCIJ staff and interns. Throughout the audit period from September 2010 to April 2011, the PCIJ also documented how and who from the agencies responded to the requests, how many days or weeks it took them to grant the requests, and in what manner or form they did.

Among other findings, the PCIJ audit showed that integrity agencies and constitutional commissions are turning out to be more secretive about their senior officials’ SALNs. They seem more ready to share the SALNs of other officials they have in custody but not the SALNs of their own agency bosses. Too, only 20 of the 35 requests that the PCIJ made were granted, making for a poor 57-percent approval rate.

Several of these approvals also took place well beyond the 10 working days deadline in law for officials and agencies to act on requests for SALNs, and the 15 working days deadline in law for them to act on requests for other documents.

This two-part report is also the PCIJ’s modest contribution to the observance on Tuesday, May 3, of World Press Freedom Day, as well as to the relentless efforts of civil-society and media groups to push for the passage of the Freedom of Information Act.

Freedom of expression and freedom of information are matters of inalienable rights of all citizens, and strategic policy advocacies, too, of the PCIJ. The PCIJ is a founding member of the Freedom Fund for Filipino Journalists (FFFJ), which continues to monitor and assist in the investigation and prosecution of the cases of media killings in the country. Too, the PCIJ is a part of the Right to Know, Right Now! Coalition, a network of 160 civil-society organizations and individuals that over the last 14 years has vigorously campaigned for the FOI bill.

Part 1 of our report summarizes the findings of our seven-month audit of the access to information regime in 27 national agencies. It comes with a Sidebar on the apparent triggers but also the new barriers to access in specific agencies.