When Vice President Sara Duterte was concurrently education secretary, the department turned to a decades-old Army youth program to account for its P15.54 million in confidential funds.
The money was reported as rewards paid to the Department of Education’s supposed informants for the Philippine military’s Youth Leadership Summits. The DepEd submitted certifications from Army officers to the Commission on Audit as proof that the information-gathering activities had “succeeded.”
During the impeachment trial of Duterte on Tuesday, September 1, Army officers testified that the certifications only established that the summits occurred, but they did not necessarily point to the existence of any informant, reward or confidential-fund expenses for the program.
Col. Manaros Boransing II said Youth Leadership Summits have been conducted since 2002 to discourage students and out-of-school youth from being recruited into insurgent or violent extremist groups.
The programs take on different formats and curricula, but are led by the Philippine Army alongside local government units, schools, local police and other community partners.
Some programs would last three or four days and combined leadership and values formation with team-building and lectures on nation-building, drugs, mental health, teenage pregnancy and insurgent recruitment.
A four-day summit in Borongan City in 2023, for example, listed 67 students and out-of-school youth as beneficiaries of talks on youth delinquency and financial literacy. A three-day program in Galimuyod, Ilocos Sur, meanwhile, covered crime and illegal drugs.
DepEd’s role in YLS
Boransing said the Army used its regular civil-military operations budget for personnel and coordination. Local governments generally covered participants’ meals, shirts and activities, while other participating agencies paid their own expenses.
“For Army participants and coordination, it was from the Army, the budget of the Army,” he said, describing the setup as “kaniya-kaniyang bayad” or KKB-a cost-sharing arrangement with agencies. LGUs would shoulder costs for youth participants.
For these summits, the DepEd serves as a partner, and not a lead organizer. It fielded subject-matter speakers, secured permission for Army personnel to speak with students and recommended schools as venues.
Boransing said his division received only open-source information from the department, and not confidential or intelligence info.
Col. Magtangol Panopio, also testifying before the Senate court, characterized DepEd’s as having a larger info-sharing hand, such as in identifying communities vulnerable to insurgent communism and extremism, drugs and family problems. He could not determine whether such information was transmitted as confidential.
As for the costs, the Army typically spent P30,000 to P60,000 per summit, Boransing said. For eight summits in 2023, the costs would not have exceeded P500,000-nowhere close to the DepEd’s supposed confidential spending of P15.54 million.
The Army officer could not attest to the DepEd’s supposed spending for informants, saying no funds were transferred to their units to stage any of the activities.
“There was no funding released to the 1st Infantry Division from DepEd, sir, of any source,” Boransing said.
The issue of certifications
Rules governing confidential funds, such as COA’s Joint Circular No. 2015-01, permit rewards to non-government informants only when supported by evidence that their information resulted in successful information-gathering or surveillance.
DepEd’s April 2024 response to COA said the Army activities were ‘directly resulting from the information provided by informers.’
For the YLS, however, Boransing said the Army usually relied on its own intelligence units without depending on the DepEd to identify security threats and crucial locations for the summits.
“For the First Infantry Tabak Division? No, sir, they did not provide any confidential or surveillance information,” Boransing said, partly in Filipino. “What they give is open-source information about their students.”
Yet he issued the certification to the DepEd citing summits successfully staged without knowing it would be used to justify confidential fund spending.
Panopio concurred with Boransing, saying his unit’s certification was limited to confirming that the summits occurred: “We did not certify anything about money or funds.”