PRESS RELEASE
4 July 2014
The labor group Partido ng
Manggagawa (PM) today added its voice to the mounting call to have the
Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) subjected to a special audit after the
Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.
PM said Malacañang’s defense that
there was nothing wrong in it since it was done in good faith is flatly
self-serving as DAP’s worth needs to be proven beyond the realm of motives or
intentions.
Likewise the claim that DAP
boasted our economic growth is even more fallacious.
“We leave the legal issues to
lawyers, the moral intentions to priests, and the political flavor of it, for a
while, to rival politicians. Our main and immediate interest here is to
know whether DAP money had gone in the same manner PDAF had been squandered,”
stated PM chairperson Renato Magtubo.
Magtubo said the political context
when DAP was concocted and eventually released has overly been discussed. “What
we want to know now is whether a DAP released to a lawmaker’s left hand is
better spent than a PDAF released to his/her right hand.”
The former partylist
representative said a special audit for used and unused DAP funds may either
clear many issues or uncover the same pattern of fraud committed under PDAF. Or
may be worse.
“Assuming the crime was repeated,
the political discussion should therefore lead to a conclusion that the whole
system is terribly wrong,” said Magtubo.
The group believes that funds
released under DAP and received by the same hands that made PDAF their personal
piggy banks are tainted with corruption. Thus the need for a special audit,
perhaps deeper and wider than the audit made on PDAF.
At the height of the pork barrel
scam PM had pushed for, as part of reforms in the budget system, the concept of
a universal social protection fund with a clearly defined social purpose yet
completely isolated from the hands of corrupt politicians.
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