The signature that eventually turned “Mary Grace Piattos” into shorthand for questionable government spending belonged to no verifiable person, an official of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) told the Senate impeachment court on September 7, 2026, as Vice President Sara Duterte’s lawyers acknowledged for the first time that many such names were never meant to be real.
Assistant National Statistician Marizza Grande, questioned by House private prosecutor Mae Divinagracia on the trial’s 22nd day, said the agency’s search of its civil registry turned up nothing for the individual credited with receiving public money. “Base sa information na ibinigay at sa aming database, wala pong record ng kapanganakan, walang record ng kasal at wala rin pong record ng kamatayan ang isang Mary Grace Piattos,” she testified.
That the name reads like a mash-up of a coffee chain and a chip brand had long fed suspicions among lawmakers, but the defense settled the point on Monday. Pressed by Senator-judge Risa Hontiveros to say plainly whether the payees were genuine, counsel Justin Gular replied that the entries were deliberate covers. “Given that it became a material matter, we have to couch this answer that is classified matter — but these are in fact, aliases, your Honor, for the consideration of this court,” Rappler quoted him as saying. Inquirer reported it was the defense’s first such admission since the proceedings opened in July.
The scale of the anomalies drawn from the receipts was considerable. Of 2,669 people listed as payees across the Office of the Vice President (OVP) and the Department of Education (DepEd), the PSA could tie only 152 to a single matching entry in its records, Rappler reported from Grande’s testimony. Within that small group were names attached to the dead and to very young children — Divinagracia noted 25 matches corresponded to minors, three of them not yet three years old, while Grande listed decedents such as Fortunato Salig and Emilio Sagan among the supposed recipients.
Grande said several of the payee names struck her as odd on sight. “I found them unusual kasi unique yung mga names na ito,” she told the court, citing entries alongside “Piattos” such as Arthur Baon, Beverly Claire Pampano, Matthew Keso and Timon Pusa, none of which corresponded to any birth, marriage or death on file.
Some of those unverifiable signatories were logged as collecting sizable sums. Acknowledgment receipts placed before the court showed a “Danrick Otso” receiving P500,000, with P250,000 amounts recorded under both Keso and a “Tina Manching,” according to the Abante account of the hearing.
The verification did not begin with the trial. Grande said the PSA, acting through Undersecretary Claire Dennis Mapa, had already furnished the House Committee on Good Government and Public Accountability with a formal certification dated November 5, 2024, on the missing records.
The prosecution used the numbers to press its central claim under Article 1 of the complaint, which alleges systematic misappropriation and improper liquidation of P500 million in OVP funds and P112.5 million released to DepEd during Duterte’s time as its secretary. Bicol Saro Rep. Terry Ridon said the point of putting statisticians on the stand was to demonstrate that the paperwork rested on people who never existed. “We will be able to show that these are fake, fictitious individuals,” he said.
Not every senator-judge treated the alias defense as fatal. Raffy Tulfo suggested the practice of masking informants’ identities might be defensible on its own, but said the recurrence of similar handwriting across separate receipts was the harder thing to explain away, and called for the security officers who compiled the name lists to be summoned.
