MANILA – Vice President Sara Duterte-Carpio denied personally seeing the acknowledgement receipts for her office’s confidential funds supposedly signed by a certain “Mary Grace Piattos”.
According to Duterte-Carpio, documents concerning her offices’ confidential expenses are submitted directly to the Commission on Audit (COA) by the special disbursing officer (SDO) and do not go through her.
“I have no comment on that, because I have not seen the acknowledgement receipt na kanilang sinasabi,” Duterte-Carpio said in an interview with the media in Butuan City.
“Basically, lahat ng mga documents, hindi siya dumadaan sa akin. Dumidiretso siya sa SDO and sina-submit siya sa…office ng COA na gumagawa ng audit ng confidential funds,” she added.
“Hindi namin alam paano pinroseso ang pagbigay ng copies ng ARs (acknowledgement receipts) or ng submissions namin sa COA to the House of Representatives, and sino ang nagha-handle noong mga documents,” she further said.
Duterte-Carpio’s comments came after the House of Representatives’ good government and public accountability committee put up a P1-million reward for any information on Piattos.
The COA previously said the OVP and DepEd submitted documents with wrong dates, signatures without names of signatories, and unreadable names of signatories to justify the disbursement of its confidential funds in 2022 and 2023.
It added that many acknowledgment receipts were dated December 2023 and there were also undated ARs.
Further, COA confirmed that there were 787 acknowledgement receipts with unnamed signatories and 302 ARs with unreadable names of signatories submitted by the OVP and DepEd to justify its confidential fund use in 2023./PN
