P3.7B cash doleouts to poor families unverified – state auditors
ABOUT P3.77 billion of the government’s budget to help the poor was spent in undocumented doleouts to recipients of the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in 2011, state auditors bared on Monday.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) administered the CCT fund.
The Commission on Audit said in a report that out of the P14.49 billion disbursed under CCT of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), P3.77 billion were unverified.
“The propriety of the disbursements of the balance of P3.77 billion could not be fully established due to lack of sufficient documentation,” the report said.
This resulted in the unreliability of the bank accounts at the Land Bank of the Phil- ippines-Batasan branch that keeps the Social Welfare department’s accounts for the poverty alleviation program.
By procedure, Land Bank branches submit to the Batasan Branch for liquidation the order of payment, acknowledgment receipt, list of paid beneficiaries and copy of debit advice. The Batasan branch then sends the documents and the bank statement to the Welfare department’s central office. The agency then verifies and records the transactions.
But in a breakdown, state auditors found
that six accounts in the government bank had P3.77-billion balance as of December 2011 because “incomplete documents.”
Account No. 3122- 1019- 74 has a P749.68-million balance, account 31221019-66 has P414.90 million, account 31221019-58 has P209.11 million, account 31221020- 59 has P350.49 million, account 3122-1018-18 has P747.73 million and account 3122-1021-05 has P1.3 billion.
The Social and Welfare department said that they addressed the problem by decentralizing the preparation of the liquidation reports to the regional offices. A unified financial management unit was instituted in March 2011, to ensure timely liquidation of paid cash grants.
The department also said that when they updated the report, P2.2 billion have already been settled.
“As of June 21, 2012, a total of P12.92 billion, or 89.17 percent of the total disbursements of P14.49 billion were liquidated, leaving an unliquidated balance of P1.57 billion,” the Social and Welfare agency said.
But state auditors said that the updated liquidation reports “still have to be validated by the audit team since the same [liquidation reports] were submitted only in June 2012.”
The resident auditor of the Social Welfare department asked the agency to submit complete documentation, which the agency stipulated in their manual for the 4Ps.
The report did not say what region has the highest number of undocumented fund releases.
Under the memorandum of agreement entered into by the department and the Land Bank, all paid disbursements should be liquidated within five days after the date of payout from other Land Bank branches to expedite booking of disburse Last year, the Welfare department received a P23.44-billion allocation for its 4Ps program that covered 2.35 million Filipinos.
The Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) had the highest number of beneficiaries at 284,909, while Cagayan province has the least number at 24,823.
The National Capital Region has 30,290; Cordillera Autonomous Region 67,080; Ilocos Region 38,063; Central Luzon 38,302; Calabarzon 103,856; Mimaropa 137,958; and Bicol Region 265,320.
In the Visayas, Western Visayas has 194,305 beneficiaries; Central Visayas has 140,230; while Eastern Visayas has 170,827.
Regions in Mindanao, excluding ARMM, has about 849,676.
Ineffective, delinquent
An earlier Audit report also said that the Welfare department also failed to liquidate nearly P1-billion fund transfers to nongovernment organizations and transferred P2 billion to government units, agencies and firms without accounting in 2011.
The Audit commission also found that by the end of 2011, the balance of nongovernment units of about P851.563 million and that the department’s central office was the most delinquent in securing liquidation reports.
The report added that the inefficient fund transfers to agency’s programs also reflect on the CCT because the department uses non-government agencies for the program.
In its review of the CCT, auditors found that the program was not strictly followed because 372 not extremely poor beneficiaries were added in 3,906 households in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, National Capital Region and Regions III, IV and V.