Category: Paper Chase

‘A Data A Day’ could help keep the crooks away…

mcmangahas Leave a comment

MASTER OUR DATA, master our story as a people.

This is the spirit behind MoneyPolitics.PCIJ.org, a citizen’s online resource, research, and analysis tool on elections, public funds, and governance in the Philippines.

A project of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, MoneyPolitics enrolls over three gigabytes (of the 57 GB now in the PCIJ Library) of unique files on the asset records, career history, and social networks of elective and appointive officials; public finance records (budget, pork barrel, etc), and election and socio-economic statistics for the provinces, towns, and cities of the Philippines.

You better not miss it: With a few more nips and tucks, MoneyPolitics will go online in a while.

But first, we introduce you to bite sizes of information that we could discern from the big data that MoneyPolitics offers — A Data A Day.

In gist, the meaning of the numbers.

A Data A Day is possibly good for body, mind, and soul.

A Data A Day could help grow better informed and thus, more empowered, citizens.

A Data A Day promotes our right to know and to access documents in the custody of public agencies.

Most important of all — we hope and pray — because voters would know better than politicians, A Data A Day could help keep the crooks away.

Here’s today’s A Data A Day (BY THE NUMBERS):

53

Fifty-three is the mean age of the candidates running for senator in the May 13, 2013 elections.

Who are the youngest and oldest?

The youngest are Greco B. Belgica of the Democratic Party of the Philippines, who will turn 35 years old, and Paolo Benigno ‘Bam’ A. Aquino IV, who will be 36 before the day of the vote.

Samson S. Alcantara of the Social Justice Society and Ernesto M. Maceda of the United Nationalist Alliance, are the oldest. Both are 77 years old.

The average age of the 23 incumbent senators, meanwhile, is 59. But re-electionist senators Antonio F. Trillanes IV (41) and Alan Peter S. Cayetano (42) are the youngest. They are the only two of the 23 senators who were born in the 1970s.

Senators Joker P. Arroyo (86) and Juan Ponce Enrile (89) are the oldest. They are also the only two born in the 1920s. — Reference: 2013 senatorial candidates’ Certificates of Candidacy, Commission on Elections

And another…

11

Only 11 of the 33 candidates for senator in the May 2013 elections were born outside Metro Manila.

They are Samson S. Alcantara of Abra, Teodoro ‘Teddy’ A. Casino of Davao City, Baldomero C. Falcone of Leyte, Richard ‘Dick’ J. Gordon of Zambales, Gregorio ‘Gringo’ B. Honasan II of Benguet, Marwil N. Llasos of Albay, Ernesto ‘Ernie’ M. Maceda of Laguna, Ramon E. Montaño of Cebu City, Aquilino Martin ‘Koko’ L. Pimentel III of Misamis Oriental, Mary Grace Poe-Llamanzares of Iloilo, and Eduardo ‘Eddie’ C. Villanueva of Bocaue, Bulacan.

The remaining 23 were all born in Metro Manila, according to the Certificates of Candidacy they filed with the Commission on Elections.

Less than half or 10 of the 23 incumbent senators were born outside Metro Manila.

They are Senators Edgardo J. Angara of Aurora, Joker P. Arroyo of Naga, Franklin M. Drilon of Iloilo, Juan Ponce Enrile of Cagayan, Gregorio B. Honasan II of Baguio, Panfilo M. Lacson of Cavite, Manuel M. Lapid of Pampanga, Aquilino Martin L. Pimentel III of Cagayan de Oro City, and Miriam D. Santiago of Iloilo. Senator Pilar Juliana S. Cayetano was born in Michigan, USA.

PCIJ launches MoneyPolitics online

Ed Lingao Leave a comment

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THE PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM (PCIJ) is proud to announce the launch of its MoneyPolitics website, a new rich database meant to enable citizens with an online resource, research, and analysis tool on elections, public funds, and governance in the Philippines.

The website, MoneyPolitics.PCIJ.org, was developed with a three-year grant from the Open Society Foundation (OSF). It will go online next week.

The site aggregates the cache of documents and databases that the PCIJ has amassed in its 24-year existence on public finance records; statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN); election spending reports; civil works contracts; graft and corruption cases; profiles of elective and appointive officials; data on elections and political families; and socio-economic statistics across the Philippines.

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PCIJ’s Malou Mangahas explains the concept behind the Money Politics site

MoneyPolitics is designed to serve as a ready-to-access tool for citizens, journalists, civil society groups, policy analysts, scholars, and public agencies and regulators. The site links and loops information enrolled in public documents to allow readers to discern how money in politics drives and defines policy and governance in the country.

PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas said that the PCIJ Library has 57 gigabytes of digital information, with more than 6,400 unique files on elective and appointive officials from mayor to the Presidents, dating to as far back as 1998.

The 57 gigabytes of digital files of the PCIJ represent just a small portion of the total cache of raw source documents that the PCIJ has collected in the course of the work on investigative reports, books, video documentaries, and training seminars by its writers, editors, researchers, and fellows.

Using the OSF grant, the PCIJ in 2011 started digitizing, aggregating, and organizing datasets for MoneyPolitics using as backbone the cache of documents that it has gathered from its birth in 1989.

More public documents were acquired to bridge the gaps in data, as well as to collect information on local elective officials and appointive officials from the other branches.

Some of the files featured in MoneyPolitics come from documents that are no longer publicly available, or had been lost over the years.

Some election spending reports, for example, had been burned in the fire that gutted the old office of the Commission on Elections in Intramuros, Manila, years ago. However, the PCIJ had managed to keep copies of these files in its library.

A work in progress, MoneyPolitics will feature a steady harvest of new and more datasets in the coming years, or in time for the synchronized national and local elections in 2016.

PCIJ Research Director Karol Ilagan said MoneyPolitcs features four content categories.

Public Profiles offers information on elective and appointed officials  from mayors, vice mayors, and councilors on the local level, up to President and Vice President, as well as from the judiciary, the constitutional commissions, the armed services, and some government-owned and -controlled corporations.

The datasets include time-series information on the career, wealth, and election donors and expenditures of public officials.

Also featured under this tab is the Social Network of the official, or data on his/her business interests and financial connections, family ties, and election donors.

A page under the Public Profiles tab is Public Spending, which focuses on pork barrel releases and disbursement by the senators and congressmen, and internal revenue allotment for the local government officials.

Campaign Finance, the second tab, uploads the statements of election contributions and expenditures (SECE) that elective officials had submitted to the Commission on Elections since 1998. This tab will allow the public a peek into how much officials spend just to bag their positions in government.

The third tab, Public Funds, presents information on how government raises revenues and spends public funds. These include data on the yearly budgets, allocations by departments, lump-sum items in the national budget such as special purpose funds and pork barrel allocations.

The fourth tab, Elections and Governance, offers data on governance indicators, political clans, and elections and socio-economic statistics for provinces, towns, and cities of the country.

Ilagan added that the PCIJ would also like to encourage the public to be more proactive by donating or uploading documents, especially on the local level.

PCIJ Researcher Rowena Caronan said development work on MoneyPolitics involved months of haunting the halls of the Commission on Elections, Office of the President, the Office of the Ombudsman, among many other public agencies that are repositories of documents, to request and photocopy official records.

At times, Caronan said, the PCIJ staff had to spend entire weeks just photocopying documents. This, however, was only the first step. The PCIJ have had to scan, digitize, organize, and aggregate the data enrolled in the documents in Excel, spreadsheet, CSV, and other formats to allow for sorting and analysis as datasets.

Interestingly, Caronan also gave everyone an idea of just how inaccessible some public documents are to the public, not just because of a culture of secrecy in some agencies but also because of the prohibitive costs of reproducing the documents.

For example, Caronan said the Office of the President charges five pesos per photocopied page, while the Civil Service Commission charges P30 per page. In some other agencies though, she said public records are available online and at no cost at all on requesting parties.

The PCIJ also had to do scraping and scripting of the data available on government websites to develop some of the pages of MoneyPolitics.

 

Of slabs of pork and bogus NGOs

mcmangahas Leave a comment

IT’S A RACKET that has not been busted from 10 years ago, and lingers on to this day.

A number of congressmen and senators have set up or hand-picked bogus and favored NGOs (nongovernment organizations) to serve as vassals of their pork barrel, or what has been dressed up with the fancy title Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).

In the last of a five-part PCIJ report titled “Pigging out on Pork a La Pinoy” published in July 2012, the Commission on Audit (COA) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) had revealed how pork has lined the bellies of many phantom and fly-by=night NGOs.

As of June 2012, in fact, the DSWD said the total pork funds that had been given to these NGOs via the DSWD central office had reached a whopping P1.4 billion from 2003 up to Dec. 31, 2011.

Of this amount, P388.9 million or nearly 28 percent remain unaccounted for as of June 2012.

Across all the DSWD’s offices, however, the total amount of unaccounted PDAF releases to NGOs by DSWD within the last decade or so today stand at about P770 million.

Eighty percent of that total, or P620 million, went to only 21 NGOs that were the most favored by congressmen and senators alike.

Among other findings, the report revealed that:

* Many NGOs had been purposely set up for only one purpose: “to get the money” or the pork. They would disappear as soon as their PDAF patrons have finished their term in Congress, and with them, the millions they had received from the pork barrel, according to DSWD Secretary Dinky Soliman. In their unceremonious exit, they leave a trail of ghost projects.

* For every peso of pork funds that legislators have awarded to NGOs from 2003 to 2011, up to 20 centavos involved fly-by-night or bogus NGOs. Most of the time, these are NGOs that had been created, born, and organized apparently for the purpose of just getting PDAF shares.

* A handful of NGOs and foundations have apparent links to, and are precisely named after the spouses, parents or grandparents of the lawmakers who gave out the pork.

* The DSWD and the Commission on Audit (COA) have laid down rules to control the awarding, monitoring, and accounting of pork releases to NGOs and foundations. But intense pressure and meddling by lawmakers in NGO selection and project implementation, along with loose monitoring and reporting mechanisms within the government, have nevertheless allowed millions of pesos in pork funds to be funneled into bogus NGOs across the country.

Real and potential conflicts of interest and questionable arrangements between NGOs and their PDAF patrons have also gone unchecked.

All these have resulted in a lot of leakage of public funds in organizations that are supposed to augment the gaps in the government’s delivery of much-needed social development projects.

The DSWD figures cover PDAF transferred to NGOs from prior to 2003 until Dec. 31, 2011, or across four Congresses, from the time of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo up to the current administration of President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III.

Read Part 5 of the PCIJ report,“Bogus, favored NGOs fail to account for P770-million pork.”

Read the rest of the PCIJ report, Pigging Out on Pork a la P-Noy here:

Part 1, PDAF racket rocks daang matuwid

Part 2, Bailiwicks, not poor towns, grab slabs of House PDAF

Part 3, Senators’ PDAF floods NCR, vote-rich provinces

Part 4, Binay bags P200-M PDAF: Pork train to Malacanang?

Sidebar, LGUs ride piggyback on pork