COA: P70M in COVID-19 funds went to 'ineligible' beneficiaries

At least P70 million of the government’s COVID-19 response funds did not go to eligible beneficiaries, according to the Commission on Audit (COA).

This is stated under COA’s Performance Audit Report on the COVID-19 Adjustment Measures Program (CAMP), a government program which provided financial support to affected workers during the pandemic.

State auditors said that the P70.26 million CAMP fund was given to 14,052 beneficiaries of which 6,214 were "ineligible" while the 7,838 were "probably ineligible beneficiaries" because they already received financial assistance from other financial support programs of the government such as the Small Business Wage Subsidy Program by Social Security System (SSS) and Department of Social Welfare and Development’s Social Amelioration Program and their monthly gross salary were above the P40,000 threshold.

“Based on the interview, DOLE (Department of Labor and Employment) only relied on applicants’ self-declaration since there was no available and complete centralized database that would serve as a basis for determining whether an applicant already received financial assistance from other programs,” the COA said.

“In addition, only the DOLE, Department of Finance (DOF), and SSS were able to have a data sharing agreement on their beneficiaries,” the COA added.

State auditors cited that under the Implementing Guidelines of Bayanihan 2 Law, the subsidies or benefits received from existing financial assistance programs  will be taken into consideration in the computation of the subsidy or benefit to be received to prevent double dipping or unauthorized receipt of multiple subsidies.

In addition, the CAMP-Bayanihan 2 guidelines issued by the DOLE provided a list that enumerates the exclusions from qualifying for the program to prevent the distribution of financial assistance to ineligible beneficiaries described in the Bayanihan 2 law.

COA also noted that the comparison of CAMP-Bayanihan 2 (beneficiaries information including SAP self-declaration) and SBWS data revealed that  a total of 33 beneficiaries received financial assistance from three government programs, and that these 33 beneficiaries had received a total of P566,000 from CAMP-Bayanihan 2 and SBWS program.

COA also used the applicants’ self-declaration from CAMP-Bayanihan 2 data to identify whether the beneficiary received SAP.  COA, however, could not determine if these 33 also received SAP due to lack of documents.

In response to COA’s findings, the DOLE Regional Offices in Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) and Region 5 explained that the identified differences were due to timing issue when the applications were processed wherein, the list of beneficiaries from other financial assistance programs were still not available.

DOLE offices in Regions 5 and 7, for their part, argued that in some cases, beneficiaries misinterpreted the options provided and mistakenly ticked the checked box.

DOLE Region 5 also said that upon validation of data, a Demand Letter will be issued for the return of the financial assistance.

COA also said that the comparison of CAMP Bayanihan 2 and SBWS data also showed that  6,181 received CAMP Bayanihan 2 financial assistance amounting to P104.61 million, and that 52 of the 6,181 beneficiaries received both CAMP-Bayanihan 2 and SBWS aid.

The 52 returned their subsidies/financial assistance to Social Security System ranging from P5,000-P17,117, totaling P472,153.

“In our analysis and the result of interview, we noted that approval of the ineligible beneficiaries (also recipients of SBWS Program) was due to : a) manual cross matching of FO evaluators on the list of SBWS beneficiaries; b) delayed provision of the list; c) lack of awareness of some DOLE regional and field office evaluators on the list of SBWS Program beneficiaries provided by SSS; and d) voluminous applications received and evaluated,” COA said.

In the same COA report, DOLE told state auditors that it will maximize efforts to generate a clean list of beneficiaries which have been cross-checked with recipients of other financial assistance programs to ensure the detection of multiple/duplicate applications before they will be processed for approval.—LDF, GMA Integrated News