A love affair with numbers

This, and more, was what the participating journalists and bloggers discussed during the last leg of PCIJ’s training seminar series on Governance by the Numbers: Advanced Investigative Reporting and Numeracy. The four-day seminar was attended by reporters, newsroom supervisors and managers, and bloggers from TV, print, and online media organizations based in Metro Manila.

The seminar was divided into three themes: investigating public funds, investigating public officials, and organizing the story and reporting numbers. The US-based nonprofit National Endowment for Democracy provided grant support for the seminar series.

Each of the themes in the seminar had experts from the government, legal profession, academe, and fraud examiners as resource speakers.

To provide the framework for the entire seminar, PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas discussed the concepts of Freedom of Information, Freedom of Expression, and Data Journalism, and how they all relate to each other and to the practice of journalism in the country.

Managahas was followed by lawyer Jose Manuel Diokno, De La Salle University College of Law Founding Dean and Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) National Chair, who briefed the participants about their legal rights in their practice of journalism. Diokno also underscored the responsibilities attached to such rights.

In the “investigating public funds” theme, Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Undersecretary Raul C. Asis walked participants through the life cycle of a public works project. He also gave them tips on how they can identify red flags and discussed how corruption could start “even at the design phase of any given project.” Asis assured participants though, that the public works department has been installing measures to weed out corrupt practices in the agency, and said that “integrity breeds excellence.”

Still under the theme of investigating public funds, Commission on Audit (COA) Director Cora Lea A. Dela Cruz enumerated the different types of audit that the COA does. She also explained key audit terms in layman’s language, and explained how COA auditors interpret the “observations” they attach to each of the types of audit.

Juan Carlos “Juancho” B. Robles, a partner at private auditing firm Punongbayan & Araullo and a director of the Philippine chapter of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, taught the participants how to spot red flags in financial statements that could possibly involve fraud, as well as the elements of fraud. Robles also presented the possible fraud schemes in the private and public sectors, such as bid rigging and kickbacks, deliberate mismanagement, and conflicts of interest.

He also introduced the participants to the Beneish Fraud Ratio, which was developed by Indiana University accounting professor Messod Daniel Beneish, Ph.D. Beneish devised analysis ratios for identifying possible financial statement frauds.

Roel R. Landingin, Manila correspondent for the Financial Times of London and PCIJ Fellow, — in his session “By the Numbers: Examples of Using Data to Investigate Public Funds” — stressed that the driving force behind the pursuit of investigative reports should be the journalist’s interest and motivation to write the story.

Landingin, who won the Jaime V. Ongpin Award for Investigative Journalism in 2008 and 2009 for his reports on corruption in public infrastructure projects and the mismanagement of foreign aid, encouraged the participants to “learn by doing.” He added that numbers and datasets could be used to question the policy assumptions of government projects. He also encouraged the participants to maximize the data sets that are readily available online, in scaling up their stories on governance. This, he said, will even help in advancing genuine transparency and accountability in government.

“Asking for more data is useless if we do not scale up in analysing these data sets,” he said.

Landingin illustrated his point by making an analogy between a company’s balance sheet to Instagram, and between an income statement with YouTube: “(A) Balance Sheet is like Instagram in that it depicts a picture of a company’s financial position at any given time. (While the) Income Statement is like YouTube because it is where you see the movement of the company’s money,” said Landingin.

PCIJ Training Director Che de los Reyes, for her part, demonstrated how journalists can handle big data sets by using spreadsheets. She led practice sessions on cleaning data and pivoting big data sets. De los Reyes also taught the participants how they could mine the i-View platform of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by doing corporate search of publicly listed companies, non-government organizations, and foundations.

On the theme “investigating public officials,” PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas told participants that investigating public officials is key in finding out unexplained wealth, conflicts of interest, and the use, abuse and misuse of public funds. It also helps in understanding the outcomes of government policies and programs.

“Corruption is not a victimless crime. There are basic services foregone because of corruption,” said Mangahas. She demonstrated how journalists could mine public documents on government officials, such as the Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth (SALN), Statement of Contribution and Expenditures (SOCE), and corporate records from the SEC.

She also briefed the participants on how they could access, read, and interpret the SALN as it is a mine of what she called ‘defining data,’ such as the Tax Identification Number (TIN), real and personal properties, liabilities, and social networks. Mangahas also discussed the SOCE that candidates and political parties file with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and how journalists could derive data from the SOCE and SALN, and corroborate these with data and information from corporate records. By connecting these documents, Mangahas explained, the reporter could map the backward and forward links of the investigative report that he is writing.