ILOILO City – Ilonggo former Senate President Franklin M. Drilon called for an urgent review of Joint Circular No. 2015-01, saying the impeachment proceedings against Vice President Sara Duterte have exposed serious weaknesses in the rules governing billions of pesos in confidential and intelligence funds.
In an interview with ANC’s Headstart, Drilon said the circular issued by the executive branch was the “first culprit” because it broadly defined the activities that could be financed using confidential and intelligence funds, or CIF.
“The Joint Circular 2015-01 of the executive branch must really govern what can be in the intelligence fund,” Drilon said. “This impeachment trial on the intelligence funds points to the very serious and immediate need to review the use of intelligence funds.”
The circular, jointly issued by the Commission on Audit, Department of Budget and Management and other government agencies in 2015, sets the guidelines for the entitlement, release, use, reporting and audit of CIF.
Drilon said confidential and intelligence funds should be limited to agencies whose legal mandates require intelligence gathering and the protection of national security.
He questioned why the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education were given such funds when intelligence gathering is not among their primary functions.
“How in heaven’s name would DepEd and the OVP have confidential and intelligence funds?” Drilon asked.
He said intelligence operations should be performed mainly by agencies such as the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency and other offices specifically tasked with gathering information on national security threats.
Drilon said Congress should pass a law imposing clearer restrictions and penalties if the existing circular cannot sufficiently prevent abuse.
Drilon also said the use of fictitious recipients in liquidating confidential expenses should be expressly prohibited, describing the practice as possible evidence of malversation.
“To me, it’s a prima facie case of malversation,” he said. “You don’t need to use fictitious names. That is not allowed under the law, even for confidential funds. But this has been the practice, and it must be stopped.”
“If a law has to be passed, then we pass a law and make it punishable,” he said.
He stressed that confidentiality is already protected through the closed-envelope liquidation system, under which sensitive records are sealed and may be examined only by authorized COA auditors.
The system, however, does not relieve government officials of their obligation to identify the actual recipients and account for every peso spent, he said.
“You still have to account for it. That’s malversation of public funds if you cannot account for it,” Drilon said.
He said the testimony presented during the impeachment trial showed not only the potential liability of the vice president but also the weakness of the government’s auditing system.
Drilon also maintained that the transfer of P125 million from the Office of the President’s contingent fund to the OVP was illegal because the OVP budget contained no existing confidential fund item that could be augmented.
He cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in Belgica v. Executive Secretary, which held that savings may be used only to augment an existing appropriation item.
“There was no item for confidential expenses in the case of the OVP and DepEd,” Drilon said. “In other words, Congress had determined that there was no need for the OVP and DepEd to have intelligence funds.”
He cited figures showing that CIF allocations throughout the bureaucracy reached P12.3 billion in 2024 and P10.2 billion in 2025.
The CIF allocation of the Office of the President, he said, rose sharply across three administrations—from P734 million in the final year of President Benigno Aquino III in 2016 to P2 billion during the first year of President Rodrigo Duterte.
It later reached P3.8 billion in 2022, Duterte’s final year in office, and climbed to P4.8 billion in 2023 under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Drilon said. The amount has grown to P9.7 billion under the 2026 national budget, he added.
“I would strongly suggest that this be looked at and revisited,” Drilon said./PN
