Effective, not performative lifestyle checks

President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. last week ordered lifestyle checks on all government officials, starting with the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), as part of his supposed crackdown on anomalous and ghost projects.

- RONALD LLAMAS

Malacañang boasted that the Office of the Ombudsman, the Commission on Audit (COA), the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), the Bureau of Customs (BOC) and even LGUs will be mobilized for this crusade. We're told that the President won't stop until all guilty parties are punished. A bold declaration? Yes, but then again, declarations are cheap. Action, not rhetoric, is the true currency in the fight against corruption.

On the surface, the announcement sounds decent, a first step toward addressing the plunder of our national coffers which, according to Senator Ping Lacson, now runs into the trillions. But the public can be forgiven for its lukewarm reaction. After all, this is not the first time the government has rolled out the promise of "lifestyle checks." It has become the default political band-aid where the administration announces it, the media buzzes and the public demanding accountability gets pacified. When the news cycle moves on, so do the investigations. Everything reverts to how it was, even worse.

We've seen this telenovela before, and it never had a sequel worth watching. Remember then-president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's government-wide lifestyle check under the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC) in 2002? Or former president, and now ICC prisoner, Rodrigo Duterte's Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC), which was supposed to sniff out crooked officials? Where are the results? How many lavish lifestyles were probed, how many ill-gotten mansions were sequestered, how many bank accounts were opened and how many officials were actually stripped of power?