Fifteen boxes marked “Confidential Funds” were hauled into the Senate session hall on Monday morning, August 3 — a visual shorthand for the case the prosecution has spent Article I trying to make: that the numbers on Sara Duterte’s confidential spending do not add up on paper, and that the missing documents are themselves the evidence.
The witness explaining how those documents fall short was Roderick Wamil, who reviewed the Office of the Vice President’s confidential expenditures at the Commission on Audit’s Intelligence and Confidential Fund Audit Office. His testimony walked the court through the audit machinery — the rules a confidential expense must satisfy, and the several formal flags COA raises when it does not.
The governing standard is a 2015 joint circular. It requires that payments to informants be approved by the agency head, tied to a specific confidential activity, and backed by documents showing the intelligence work actually succeeded — even if the sensitive details stay sealed. Wamil testified that the OVP’s submissions produced receipts but rarely that final piece of proof.
COA’s objections came in layers, each a distinct instrument. The first is a notice of suspension, which Wamil issued over the OVP’s fourth-quarter 2022 funds — a temporary flag COA raises when disbursements look illegal, irregular or improper and it wants supporting papers. Its annex documented the paper trail’s most striking gaps: P25.66 million liquidated with acknowledgment receipts dated December 2023, a full year after the money was spent, and P3.27 million backed by receipts carrying no date at all. The receipts also totaled P125.15 million — P150,000 more than the P125 million the OVP itself reported.
A suspension that goes unanswered hardens into a notice of disallowance, COA’s formal rejection of an expense it deems irregular, excessive or unjustified, together with an order to personally return the money. Duterte’s offices have drawn both. State auditors disallowed P73.28 million in 2022 confidential spending, a ruling COA later affirmed after denying the OVP’s appeal, making it final and executory. Then, in a notice dated March 31, 2026, COA disallowed a further P375 million covering three cash advances of P125 million each spent between February and September 2023 — pushing the potential total the Vice President and her officials may be ordered to repay to roughly P448 million.
The reasons COA gave in the 2023 disallowance echoed the pattern Wamil described in court: P199 million supported only by acknowledgment receipts, with no sales or official receipts; P62 million in reward payments lacking any documentation that information-gathering had succeeded; and cash advances transferred from the authorized special disbursing officer, Gina Acosta, to the head of the Vice-Presidential Security and Protection Group, Colonel Raymund Dante Lachica — a handoff the circular does not allow.
On the stand Monday, Wamil tied that documentary record directly to Duterte, testifying that she signed the OVP’s liquidation report certifying that the purpose of the P125-million cash advance had been accomplished, even as the reports omitted the specific confidential activities the rules require. He said he did not know how the OVP ultimately answered his suspension notice; he had been reassigned to another COA unit by then.
The court adjourned Monday afternoon and resumes Tuesday at 10 a.m., with the prosecution continuing to build its record box by box.
