Comelec to candidates:
Report expenses or else

THE COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS reminded winners in the 2013 midterm elections to file their statements of election contributions and expenditures (SECEs) before 5 p.m. of June 13.

Otherwise, said campaign finance unit head Commissioner Christian Robert Lim, the winning candidate will not be allowed to assume his post on June 30. Repeat offenders face perpetual disqualification from public office.

In a public forum organized by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, Lim reminded candidates of a memorandum of agreement between the Comelec and the Department of Interior and Local Governments wherein candidates who do not file their SECEs will not be allowed to assume office.

Under election rules, candidates and their political parties must file their SECEs within 30 days after the elections. The deadline falls on June 12, a holiday; the Comelec says the deadline will now be after office hours of June 13.

Lim said that the Comelec will probably be able to release a full report to the public on which candidates have not filed their SECEs by June 26 or June 27. This gives the DILG enough time to prevent winning candidates who have not filed their SECEs from assuming office.

In addition, Lim said the Comelec intends to go back to its records from the 2007 elections to look into which candidates have consistently not been filing their SECEs as required by law.

Lim said that under the law, a candidate who fails to file his SECE within 30 days after the election would face an administrative fine for the first offense. With a second offense, the candidate would then be perpetually disqualified from seeking public office.

Lim says it would be interesting to see which of the candidates have been ignoring the requirement to report on their contributors and their expenses.

“We want to show that we are serious, that we will audit the reports that they have filed,” Lim said.

Lim said the first level of the Comelec audit into the campaign spending and expenditure reports would be whether the candidates have actually filed their SECEs, and in the right format. The next level would be whether the information contained in the SECE is complete. The last level would be the actual audit, or whether the information contained in the SECE is both accurate and reliable.