Anti-corruption drive: ‘Told by an idiot/Signifying nothing’
THE flood-control funds scandal has produced an avalanche of accusations against senators, congressmen, government officials, contractors and their alleged accomplices. Congressional hearings have become spectacles of accusation and denunciation, while newspapers, television networks and social media have transformed allegations into what appear to be established facts. The public is being encouraged to believe that hundreds of those implicated will eventually be hauled before the courts and punished for stealing taxpayers’ money.
Yet one crucial question has hardly been asked: Does the Office of the Ombudsman, the institution principally responsible for prosecuting corruption among public officials, actually have the manpower and resources to bring all these people to justice?
The available figures suggest that it does not. The ombudsman’s office is severely understaffed, already burdened with thousands of pending cases and dependent on a judicial system notorious for its delays. The government is promising what amounts to an unprecedented prosecutorial campaign by an institution that has struggled to dispose of its ordinary workload.
There is an enormous difference between accusing someone of corruption and proving his guilt in court. The first requires little more than a congressional hearing or a sensational newspaper headline. The second requires admissible evidence, painstaking investigation, competent prosecutors and years of litigation.
Half
At a Senate budget hearing in September, Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla disclosed that his office had only 1,192 personnel against 2,439 authorized positions. This means that 1,247 positions, or 51 percent of its authorized workforce, were vacant. The institution that was expected to lead the campaign against government corruption was operating with fewer than half the personnel it was authorized to employ. Its noble task isn’t attractive to lawyers. I had a college friend, from the lower class, who right after passing the bar joined the Office of the Ombudsman. After 15 years, he retired and had built a mansion.
These positions include not only lawyers but investigators, accountants, auditors, administrative employees and other specialists. Nevertheless, the enormous personnel deficit provides compelling evidence of the ombudsman’s institutional weakness. An agency already struggling with its regular responsibilities cannot suddenly absorb hundreds of complicated criminal investigations without sacrificing either the speed or quality of its work.
The ombudsman’s 2015 annual report recorded only 385 lawyers against 723 authorized lawyer positions. Although these are historical figures and cannot be treated as its current lawyer complement, they demonstrate that the shortage of legal personnel has persisted for years. Remulla reported that 60 additional lawyers had been hired in 2026, with another 40 targeted for recruitment by November.
But even 100 additional lawyers would hardly transform the institution’s capacity. Not every lawyer employed by the ombudsman is a trial prosecutor. Many conduct preliminary investigations, handle administrative cases, prepare legal opinions, supervise regional offices or perform other duties. The number actually available to prosecute criminal cases before the Sandiganbayan and regular courts is considerably smaller than the total legal workforce.
The ombudsman has not disclosed precisely how many full-time prosecutors it employs, how many criminal cases each handles and how many additional prosecutors would be required to prosecute those implicated in the flood-control scandal. Without these figures, government assurances that everyone responsible will be punished amount to little more than political promises.
Thousands
The manpower shortage becomes even more alarming when measured against the ombudsman’s existing workload. As of June 30, 2026, the office reported 4,219 pending cases, consisting of 1,955 criminal cases, 2,258 administrative cases and six forfeiture cases. These cases already compete for the attention of its limited pool of lawyers and investigators.
Remulla himself acknowledged that some cases had remained unresolved for as long as 15 years. Such delays are not merely embarrassing. They can lead to the dismissal of cases because the Constitution guarantees every accused the right to speedy disposition of proceedings.
Consequently, the more cases the ombudsman files without sufficient personnel to pursue them, the greater the possibility that some will eventually collapse through delay. Filing hundreds of complaints may generate impressive headlines today while creating legal disasters years later.
The flood-control funds scandal presents especially formidable investigative challenges. Allegations of ghost projects, overpriced contracts, kickbacks and diverted public funds cannot be established merely through testimony at congressional hearings. Prosecutors must examine bidding documents, contracts, payment records, inspection reports, bank transactions and the actual condition of infrastructure projects.
They must determine who authorized particular transactions, who benefited financially, whether officials knowingly participated in illegal arrangements and whether the evidence establishes the elements of specific criminal offenses. A contractor’s assertion that he delivered millions of pesos to a politician may justify an investigation, but it does not automatically establish that the politician committed plunder or bribery.
This distinction has been largely ignored in the sensational coverage of the scandal. An accusation is often treated as a conviction, even when no court has examined the evidence or heard the defense.
Only 52
On October 12, Remulla reported that the ombudsman had filed 39 flood-control-related cases involving 52 individuals. Thirty-five cases were before the Sandiganbayan and four before regional trial courts. These included plunder, malversation and violations of the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act.
The filings demonstrate that the ombudsman is not paralyzed. But they also reveal the enormous difference between the multitude of individuals publicly implicated and the comparatively small number against whom criminal charges have actually been filed.
More importantly, filing a criminal case is only the beginning of prosecution, not its successful conclusion. Prosecutors must subsequently handle motions, present witnesses, authenticate documents, establish the participation of each accused and defend convictions against appeals. A single complicated plunder case can consume years of prosecutorial work.
Remulla has described the ghost-project component alone as approximately 18 times the scale of the pork barrel scam. If this assessment is accurate, the ombudsman faces a prosecutorial undertaking of extraordinary proportions, without anything approaching a corresponding expansion of its resources.
The problem extends to the Sandiganbayan and regular courts, which must hear these cases. Even if the Office of the Ombudsman doubled its prosecutors, the resulting increase in criminal filings could simply transfer the congestion from the investigating institution to the judiciary.
Precedent
The pork barrel scandal that erupted in 2013 provides a warning against confusing sensational accusations with successful prosecutions. Politicians were publicly condemned, criminal complaints were filed, and the public was assured that those responsible would be imprisoned.
Yet the results have been far less dramatic than the original publicity suggested. Senator Bong Revilla was acquitted of plunder in 2018. Senator Jinggoy Estrada was acquitted of plunder in January 2024, although the same judgment convicted him of bribery; that conviction was overturned in August 2024. Juan Ponce Enrile was acquitted of plunder in October 2024, together with his chief of staff Jessica Reyes. Who was convicted of plunder and jailed? Only Revilla’s aide Richard Cambe, who died in prison in 2021, and the one you’d recognize, Janet Lim Napoles, who invented the scam, but was really a nobody.
These outcomes do not prove that the original allegations were fabricated. They demonstrate how much more difficult it is to establish criminal guilt than to persuade the public that somebody is guilty. They also show the enormous time required to resolve major corruption cases.
Congress should be as enthusiastic about funding prosecutors, investigators, forensic accountants and additional judicial capacity as it has been about conducting televised hearings. Otherwise, its investigations risk becoming elaborate exercises in political theater, generating accusations that the justice system cannot effectively resolve.
The country has repeatedly witnessed the same cycle: sensational revelations, public outrage, promises of punishment, criminal charges and, eventually, the gradual disappearance of cases from public attention. Years later, the public discovers that some accused have been acquitted, others remain on trial, and many allegations have never resulted in prosecution.
The flood-control scandal threatens to repeat this pattern on a much larger scale. An ombudsman operating with fewer than half its authorized personnel cannot reasonably be expected to perform miracles simply because politicians have promised that everyone implicated will be punished.
The real measure of the anti-corruption campaign will not be the number of people publicly accused, the number of congressional hearings conducted or even the number of criminal cases filed. It will be the number of prosecutions completed, convictions sustained and stolen public funds recovered.
Until then, the country may be witnessing not the greatest campaign against corruption in its history, but another spectacular demonstration of how accusations can multiply far more rapidly than the government’s capacity to administer justice.
Imelda Marcos’ recent acquittal by the Supreme Court, 35 years after graft charges were filed against her in 1991, is emblematic of the monumental failure of the Philippines’ anti-corruption machinery. Despite her conviction by the Sandiganbayan in 2018, she did not spend a single day in prison for those offenses, and the Supreme Court eventually overturned the verdict because of fundamental deficiencies in the prosecution’s evidence and legal arguments.
That the government, after more than three decades of litigation and the expenditure of enormous public resources, could not sustain a conviction in one of the country’s most celebrated corruption cases is a damning indictment of our justice system. Her case illustrates how the Philippine government’s much-publicized campaigns against corruption can end in decades of litigation, failed prosecutions and ultimately no criminal punishment.
Indeed, to borrow from Shakespeare’s description of life itself, our anti-corruption drive, even the current dramatic one, is “A tale told by an idiot/full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Anti-corruption drive: ‘Told by an idiot/Signifying nothing’
Source: Breaking News PH
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