The last executive lock on Vice President Sara Duterte’s confidential financial history came off on Thursday morning, July 30, 2026. Bureau of Internal Revenue representatives carried the documents into the office of Senate Secretary and impeachment court clerk Renato Bantug Jr., delivered in sealed boxes labeled by annex, and left them as part of the evidentiary record. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had signed the authorization that made the handover legal, clearing the one approval the Senate could not compel on its own.
The turnover covered more than the Vice President’s returns. Alongside her documents were the tax records of her husband, lawyer Manases “Mans” Carpio, and filings tied to 19 corporate entities and one partnership linked to the couple. On the same day, representatives of BDO and Metrobank submitted subpoenaed bank records of Duterte, meaning the court now holds both the tax filings and the deposit trail it will need to test them against each other.
Why the President had to sign off
Tax returns in the Philippines are not automatically available to any court that wants them. Under Section 270 of the National Internal Revenue Code, income tax records are confidential and can be disclosed only in the narrow circumstances the law spells out — one of which is presidential authorization. The Senate impeachment court had already ruled that it could subpoena the documents, but the BIR could not physically release them until Marcos approved.
That gave the President a decision with real political weight. Malacañang had earlier voiced reservations about the arrangement, warning that requiring presidential sign-off to unseal tax records could set a precedent that boxes in a future president facing the same kind of proceeding. The Palace ultimately set that concern aside. Press Officer Claire Castro framed the choice as deference to the law rather than a move against Duterte, saying the President would follow whatever the legal process required and would not withhold the truth from the public. In a separate message to Reuters, Castro said the records could now be opened and used by both sides as evidence.
What the records actually feed into
The documents matter because of one specific charge. Duterte faces four articles of impeachment: systematic misuse of confidential funds, unexplained wealth, bribery of Department of Education officials, and grave threats against the President and his family. The tax records go to the second article — the allegation that she accumulated wealth disproportionate to her lawful income and failed to fully disclose assets in her Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth.
That is the kind of charge where paper decides the outcome. An unexplained-wealth case is won or lost on whether the numbers reconcile: what a public official reported earning, what they declared owning, and what actually moved through their accounts. Tax filings, SALNs and bank records are the three sides that get laid against one another. Testimony in the trial has already pointed to suspicious transactions totaling P6.77 billion running through the couple’s accounts, and the first article’s proceedings surfaced roughly P612.5 million in confidential funds handled through the Office of the Vice President and the education department. The tax records now let prosecutors argue whether the declared income can plausibly account for any of it.
What it means for Duterte
In the immediate term, it strips away a defense she had been pressing. Her legal team argued the subpoenas for the tax records were illegal and violated due process, and the sealed status of the BIR documents was part of what kept the unexplained-wealth article at arm’s length. With the records inside the court and admissible, that line of resistance is largely spent, and the article her defense had reason to fear most now has the underlying evidence attached to it.
What it does not do is decide anything by itself. Releasing the records is a procedural step, not a verdict. A conviction requires the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate, a threshold the presiding officer has fixed at 16 of the chamber’s 24 members — a count that treats the Senate as a 24-seat body even though three senators are absent from the trial over their own legal troubles. That math has consistently been read as an uphill climb for the prosecution, and some legal figures continue to argue the number should be lower given the absences. A conviction on even one article would remove Duterte from office and could carry permanent disqualification from public office, which is why the case is inseparable from her stated plan to run for president in 2028. An acquittal leaves her in the vice presidency and clears the largest obstacle in front of that campaign.
The records also raise the stakes of what they contain. Neither the Senate nor the BIR disclosed anything about the filings when they were handed over, and their evidentiary value depends entirely on what emerges when prosecutors put them next to the SALNs and the bank data. Clean, consistent numbers would blunt the unexplained-wealth article. Gaps between declared income and actual holdings would turn it into the concrete, document-backed case the defense has been working to keep sealed.
The trial resumes August 3, with the tax records now part of the file the senator-judges will weigh.
