A former state auditor drew a sharp line between his job and what a senator-judge described as an investigation, telling the Senate impeachment court on Wednesday that his review of the Office of the Vice President’s confidential fund records amounted to a compliance check rather than a probe.
The distinction came up during the 13th day of Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial, when Senator-judge Robinhood Padilla questioned Roderick Wamil, a former auditor with the Commission on Audit’s Intelligence and Confidential Funds Audit Office. Pressed on whether he was the one handling the investigation into the confidential funds, Wamil pushed back on the framing.
“Hindi po siya imbestigasyon. Evaluation po,” he told the court.
Wamil explained that his mandate never extended to conditions on the ground or fieldwork, and that his duty as an auditor was confined to going over the documents the OVP submitted to support its liquidation of confidential funds. Before that exchange, Padilla had probed the auditor’s personal exposure to security realities, asking whether he grasped the difficulties faced by far-flung communities and the situation in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao. As Manila Bulletin reported, Padilla framed the point pointedly, questioning how someone not personally exposed to those conditions could be the one examining the confidential fund records. Wamil confirmed he had been to BARMM when asked.
Padilla went further, tying the release schedule of the OVP’s confidential funds to dates observed by communist groups and linking the Department of Education, which oversees basic education in the country, to his claim that the communist movement’s political wing draws recruits from universities. Wamil declined to weigh in on that assertion, saying it fell outside what he could address.
The auditor testified as the prosecution built its case under Article I of the impeachment complaint, which centers on the alleged misuse of P612.5 million in confidential funds by offices under Duterte’s control during her stint as Vice President and concurrent education secretary.
Earlier in the proceedings, the questioning turned to an unusual feature of the OVP’s spending. Senator-judge Risa Hontiveros zeroed in on records showing medicines handed out as rewards to informants, pointing to a liquidation entry in which someone listed as “Mary Grace Piattos” was recorded as receiving P70,000 worth of medicines. Asked whether swapping medicine for intelligence was standard practice, Wamil said the OVP under Duterte was the first office he encountered that used medicines as payment, calling the arrangement “not normal.”
The prosecution has anchored much of Article I on gaps in the paperwork. According to earlier testimony, the OVP’s P125 million confidential fund liquidation covering December 21 to 31, 2022 rested on hundreds of acknowledgment receipts without a single official receipt or sales invoice to back it up.
