Confidential funds spent by the Office of the Vice President must still be examined like any other government expenditure because they come from public money, a former state auditor told the impeachment court trying Vice President Sara Duterte on Wednesday, August 5, 2026.
The exchange came on the 13th day of the trial, when Senator-Judge Risa Hontiveros questioned whether the “confidential” label shields such spending from review. “Kahit ‘confidential’ ang tawag sa confidential funds, kailangan busisiin pa rin yung pinagkagastusan?” she asked. Roderick Wamil, a former auditor with the Commission on Audit’s Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office (COA-ICFAO), replied: “Yes po, Your Honor, kasi public funds po siya.”
Wamil, the prosecution’s third witness for the first article of impeachment, faced clarificatory questions from senator-judges about what the audit body could verify from the OVP’s liquidation documents and what its findings legally established. The article accuses Duterte of misusing P612.5 million in confidential funds across the OVP and the Department of Education, which she headed as education secretary.
Much of the day centered on how the OVP documented its spending. According to Philstar, the office submitted 845 acknowledgment receipts covering P125 million in confidential funds disbursed in the fourth quarter of 2022 — the first time, Wamil said, that he had encountered an agency relying solely on acknowledgment receipts rather than official receipts or sales invoices. He drew a distinction between payments to informants, where acknowledgment receipts may be accepted, and purchases from suppliers, which require official receipts.
Hontiveros also pressed the auditor on entries recording medicines given as “rewards” to informants, including one showing a recipient identified as “Mary Grace Piattos” receiving P70,000 worth of medicine. Wamil said such an arrangement was not normal and that the OVP was the first agency where he had seen it, adding that COA could not confirm whether the rewards reached genuine informants or produced useful intelligence because the required evidence was not submitted.
The prosecution later called COA auditor Xylene del Campo as its fourth witness. The defense has argued separately that no COA regulation bars the OVP from spending P125 million in confidential funds within a matter of days.
