Bogus NGOs: P770-M ‘missing’ pork

FOR every peso of pork funds that legislators have awarded to NGOs from 2003 to 2011, up to 20 centavos involved their favored fly-by-night or bogus non-government organizations.

Most of the time, according to Social Welfare and Development Secretary Corazon ‘Dinky’ Soliman, these are NGOs that had been created, born, and organized apparently for the purpose of just getting PDAF shares.

In the last nine years ending Dec. 31, 2011, the DSWD Central Office alone reports to have released P1.4 billion to NGOs in pork monies from congressmen and senators. Of this amount, P388.9 million or nearly 28 percent remain unaccounted for as of June 2012.

The DSWD’s central office accounts for the largest share of unliquidated PDAF releases to NGOs. Across all the DSWD’s offices, however, the total amount of unaccounted PDAF releases to NGOs by DSWD within the last decade or so today stand at about P770 million.

A handful of NGOs and foundations that have been so blessed with pork have apparent links to, and are precisely named after the spouses, parents or grandparents of the lawmakers who gave out the pork.

And even against the better counsel of the DSWD that only NGOs with clear track record and registration papers must be conduits of pork, six in every 10 lawmakers insist that the funds be awarded to their handpicked NGOs, Soliman says. 

DSWD officials may protest the choice, but only to their own peril – if their wishes are not granted, some lawmakers have threatened to get them transferred or to humiliate them “on the floor,” or in the case of Soliman, to be given rough sailing at the Commission on Appointments.

Read the last installment of our five-part series, “Pigging out on Pork a la Pinoy,” here.