A love affair with numbers

By Cong B. Corrales

STRONG with words, weak with numbers.

That, for the longest time, seems to be the stereotype of journalists.

As PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas says in jest, most reporters take up journalism because it only has one Math subject for the entire course.

However, Mangahas always counters this by saying that it is important for journalists to learn to appreciate what stories they could mine behind the numbers.

PCIJ believes that the biggest and most strategic problems that confronts the country are all writ large in numbers, thus its efforts in promoting numeracy among journalists as well as citizen-journalists.

This, and more, was what participants to the last leg of PCIJ’s seminar series on Governance by the Numbers: Advanced Investigative Reporting and Numeracy shared with each other. This year, they were composed of senior journalists and bloggers from the National Capital Region.

At least 22 participants attended the first half of the seminar on September 17 to 18 at Luxent Hotel, Quezon City. The third and last day of the seminar had been postponed to October 19 to 20, when Typhoon Mario pummeled Northern Luzon and its downpour flooded most parts of the National Capital Region—18 participants returned to finish the second half of the seminar.

The seminar series aim to improve the investigative skills of mainstream journalists, citizen-journalists, and bloggers throughout the country in sourcing, analyzing, and correlating documents, numbers and information.

“Hindi siya special siopao but you just really need patience in analysing the meaning of the numbers, discerning the meaning and logic of the data,” said Mangahas.

The seminar series is divided into three themes: investigating public works, investigating public officials, and organizing the story and reporting numbers. It is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Each of the themes in the seminar featured various experts from the government service, legal profession, academe, and even international fraud examiners.

To lay the grounds on the seminar’s themes, PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas briefed the participants, first, on the concepts of Freedom of Information, Freedom of Expression and Data Journalism.

This was followed with De La Salle University College of Law Founding Dean and Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) National Chair Jose Manuel Diokno discussing with the participants about their legal rights and responsibilities in the practice of journalism.

In investigating public works theme, Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Undersecretary Raul C. Asis led in showing the participants the public works project life cycle and how to identify red flags in public works projects and how corruption could start “even at the design phase of any given project.”

However, Asis told participants that the public works department has been installing measures to weed out corrupt practices in their office saying “integrity breeds excellence.”

Asis shared that for being a “crusader” for reforms inside DPWH, he had been instrumental in exposing many questionable practices inside the department.

Still under the theme of investigating public works, Commission on Audit (COA) Director Cora Lea A. Dela Cruz enumerated the different types of audit they do, as well as defining the audit terms in layman’s language and interpreting 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 fraud in financial statements and the concept of fraud predication which means the totality of circumstances where there is motivation, opportunity and rationalization their is a high probability of deception, misappropriation, estafa, or plunder for government officials.

Robles holds over 25 years of combined experience in public accounting, government auditing, internal audit, fraud-forensic audit, among others and also trained abroad in a US public accounting firm. He later worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) where he received various awards and commendations for his outstanding work against white collar crimes and public corruption.

He also introduced the participants to the Beneish Fraud Ratios. It is developed by Messod Daniel Beneish, Ph.D, an accounting professor at Indiana University, who devised analysis ratios for identifying possible financial statement fraunds.

Manila correspondent for the Financial Times and contributor to PCIJ, Roel R. Landingin—in his talk on “How we did it?”—told participants that it is the interest and motivation to write a story that should be the driving force behind investigative reports.

Landingin also encouraged the participants to “learn by doing” and that numbers and datasets can be used to question policy assumptions of projects. He also encouraged the participants to maximize the datasets that are readily available online in scaling up their stories in governance as this will even help in advancing genuine transparency and accountability of government.

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

Landingin used to be the business editor of the Manila Times and was the Philippine bureau chief for Bloomberg News. He won the Jaime V. Ongpin investigative journalism awards in 2009 and 2008 for his reports on the mismanagement of foreign aid in the Philippines and how corruption doomed a government flagship airport project.

He simplified understanding any given company’s balance sheet and income statement by likening it to Instagram and Youtube, respectively.

“(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 delos Reyes, for her part, taught the participants on how to handle datasets through Excel. She led practice sessions on how to clean and pivot big datasets. Delos Reyes also taught the participants on how to maximize the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for their investigative reports by “reverse searching” listed companys, non-government organizations and foundations.

On the theme on investigating public officials, PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas told participants that investigating public officials is key in finding out unexplained wealth, conflicts of interest, use, abuse, misuse of public funds and 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.

Mangahas taught the participants how to maximize public documents of 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 briefed the participants on accessing, reading, and interpreting the SALNs of public officials as it is a mine of what she called as “defining data,” such as the Tax Identification Number (TIN), real and personal properties, liabilities, and social networks.

Mangahas also discussed the SOCE filed by political candidates with the Commission on Elections (Comelec) and deriving data and connections from corporate records and financial statments.

By connecting these documents, Mangahas explained, the reporter could now map the backward and forward tracks of the investigative report he is writing.

As Baltic Center for Investigative Journalism founder and director Inge Springe said during an interview with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that “everyone can be an investigative journalist.”

“The main thing is just to have passion, a real desire and interest in what (you are) doing. The skill will come over time,” she added.