MANILA, Philippines – A senior member of the Cabinet revealed the first-ever discovery of a scam allegedly involving government officials assigned to implement the Arroyo administration’s emergency employment program for unemployed Filipinos and workers retrenched from their jobs due to the global economic and financial turmoil.
With the discovery, Secretary Lito Atienza of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) announced he ordered the suspension for 90 days of four officials at the DENR office in Cagayan province, Cagayan Valley in the Northern Luzon highlands.
At the top of the list of the suspension order, Atienza said, was Armando Bucad, the provincial environment and natural resources officer of Cagayan.
He said Bucad and the three other officials were suspended following the discovery of an apparent scheme to shortchange the beneficiaries of an emergency employment project on reforestation for upland communities in Cagayan.
Based on initial findings, Atienza disclosed the four officials were allegedly involved in the juggling of funds to undercut the payment to farmer beneficiaries and defray the questionable purchase of seedlings amounting to millions of pesos, which he did not specify.
For this reason, the DENR secretary said that six other DENR personnel assigned to the accounting units of the department’s provincial offices are also being investigated for their possible involvement in a similar scandal.
This includes the personnel working at the DENR offices in the Cordillera Administrative Region also in the Northern Luzon highlands, Atienza said.
“This is very disturbing,” Atienza pointed out. “This is graft at its rawest form where upland farmers, whom we consider the country’s poorest of the poor, are being milked by the very people whose sworn duty is to help them.”
He revealed DENR investigators discovered the alleged anomaly after two upland farmers in Cagayan complained that the seedlings they bought for their reforestation activities were overpriced.
Moreover, the farmers complained they were not paid the amount as stipulated in their contracts for their reforestation projects, which were equivalent to $400 each.
Citing one of the highlights of the investigation report, Atienza said the four officials, among others, directly contracted the seedling supplier who is based hundreds of kilometers away in Batangas province in Southern Luzon.
Worse still, Atienza said the officials acted as the collection agents of the supplier by ordering the automatic deduction for the payment of the seedlings, which were found to be overpriced, from the amount that was to be paid to the farmer beneficiaries.
Highly-reliable DENR sources, who requested anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to media, disclosed this was the first time that a scandal was unearthed following the recent launching of the emergency employment program to help unemployed Filipinos and workers laid off from their jobs due to the deepening global crisis.
The DENR, the sources said, was entrusted with the task of implementing “green projects,” like reforestation, to be funded by the Arroyo administration’s economic stimulus program.worth about $6 billion.
Because of the huge amount allocated, lawmakers and concerned sectors urged the government to take special care to protect the funds from falling into the hands of corrupt officials and influential individuals.
The program is being spearheaded by the Department of Public Works and Highways and the Department of Agriculture, considered as two of the biggest government agencies, which have launched job fairs, especially for the retrenched workers, to help them cushion the adverse impact of the crisis.
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