Thursday, April 17, 2008 Groups decry new COA guidelines
WITHOUT financial aid from the Cebu City Government, operations of several nongovernment organizations (NGOs) could be crippled and services might not be delivered, their officers said.
The mobile school for street children might be stopped and revelers might no longer find the Sinulog grand parade as spectacular as they used to.
Cebu City Task Force on Street Children (CCTFSC) Co-Chairperson Margot Osmeña said the new Commission on Audit (COA) guidelines are unfair, and should not be imposed on all local government units (LGUs).
If COA insists on its implementation, four NGOs headed by Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s wife would lose the financial assistance they get from the City.
CCTFSC receives some P600,000 from City Hall, which covers administration expenses, mobile school operations and activities like the annual summer camp and recognition of graduates.
It also gets funding from other agencies like the United Nations Children’s Fund, but the bulk of the CCTFSC’s funds comes from the City.
No P7M funding
The Children of Cebu Foundation, which runs the Parian Drop-In Center, also gets assistance from the City for the salaries of its security guards and office staff.
But what worries CCTFSC officials most is the possibility that they would not get the P7 million annual assistance they had requested for the operations of the Cebu City
Operation Second Chance, the first jail facility for minor offenders.
“It’s just not fair. Who will be affected by this? It’s not me, it’s the children. Why is COA punishing everybody, why don’t they go after those who are abusing the funding from LGUs?” Osmeña told Sun.Star Cebu.
Rationale
To help prevent graft and corruption, COA issued last October a memorandum prohibiting the granting of financial aid to NGOs whose incorporator, organizer, director or officer is related up to the fourth consanguinity to any government official involved in the processing, approval and disbursement of government funds.
Other NGOs that stand to be affected are the Cebu Investments Promotion Center (CIPC), Cebu Historical Affairs Commission (Chac) Foundation, Lihok Filipina, Cebu City Dancesport Team, Cebu Pistols Rifle Association (CPRA) and Sinulog Foundation, Inc.
“It’s COA’s job to check if there are irregularities in how the government’s money is spent. So why do they make a blanket denial of these funds? That only means they’re not doing their job,” Margot said.
She added that as far as the CCTFSC is concerned, they comply with liquidation and audit requirements so COA can easily check if money is not well spent.
CIPC managing director Joel Mari Yu, in a separate interview, said the memorandum would greatly affect the operations of their office, which gets 70 percent of its funding requirements from the City.
Significant amount
“Cebu City provides a very significant amount for our operations and if that is compromised, it will fatally affect us. You have to remember that we do not only market the SRP, we also bring investors to other parts of Cebu,” he told Sun.Star Cebu.
CIPC, the marketing arm of the South Road Properties (SRP), gets P3 million a year from the City as support for its main activities and another P2 million to P3 million for its activities related to the SRP.
The CPRA, which trains all the city’s 900 policemen in firearms proficiency, receives P2 to P3 million for ammunition and training activities.
Mayor Osmeña is the founding chairman of CIPC while his first-degree cousin and former city councilor Rogelio “JingJing” Osmeña is president of the CPRA.
City Administrator Francisco Fernandez, whose wife chairs the Lihok Filipina Foundation, said asking the personalities concerned to resign from their posts is not an option, the City is considering to resolve the matter.
“Even if they resign as heads of these bodies, they would still be covered by the memo because most of them are also the incorporators of the NGOs when they were first created,” he explained, citing the case of his and the mayor’s wife.
Osmeña and Vice Mayor Michael Rama already said earlier they would appeal to the COA central office to be exempted from the policy, saying the NGOs have been operating for a long time and have done a lot for the City and its people. (LCR)
