PSA asked anew to verify over 1,900 names who received OVP confi funds

A House panel has asked again the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) to verify the identities of 1,992 individuals who received confidential fund from the Office of Vice President (OVP) from December 2022 to September 2023.

“May we request for the verification of the Civil Registry Documents (birth, marriage, and death) of the names in the attached list relative to the investigation being conducted by the committee,” House good government and public accountability panel chairperson and Manila Rep. Joel Chua said in his December 9 letter to National Statistician and Civil Registrar General Claire Dennis Mapa.

The 1,992 individuals were signatories of the acknowledgement receipts submitted by the OVP to the Commission on Audit (COA) to liquidate the confidential funds.

The request follows an earlier confirmation of PSA that at least 405 individuals who received confidential funds from Department of Education (DepEd), during the stint of Vice President Sara Duterte as secretary, have no birth record. These were also the same signatories in the acknowledgement receipts submitted by the OVP to COA.

Chua said that the absence of birth record of these 405 individuals makes the OVP liquidation suspicious at the very least.

“A certification that these names are not in the PSA database would bolster suspicions that they do not exist and that the ARs (acknowledgement receipts) were fabricated to justify confidential fund expenditures by the OVP and DepEd under Vice President Duterte,” he said.

PSA earlier said that one of the signatories in the ARs, identified as Mary Grace Piattos, has no records of any civil registry document to her name.

It was earlier revealed before the Chua-led panel that the OVP and DepEd submitted faulty ARs in liquidating confidential funds with wrong dates, non-readable or unnamed signatories, among other inconsistencies.—AOL, GMA Integrated News