Digital transparency for a cleaner Philippine budget

Corruption in public spending isn’t an abstraction for Filipinos; we see it every time a “completed” project turns out to be a patch of mud or a slab that cracks after the first rain.

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This year’s outrage over budget insertions made the pattern plain. Former Budget Secretary Florencio Abad called out what he described as an “unprecedented” P1.45 trillion in congressional insertions and reallocations in the national budget, the kind of maneuvering that FINEX FOLIO bends priorities away from planning toward politics.

When money is parked where it shouldn’t be, results follow, and not the good kind. The country is now digging through allegations that flood control funds were siphoned off through “ghost” or substandard projects that padded costs, enriched middlemen and left communities exposed to rising water.

If we want that cycle to break, we need digital transparency that exposes every peso’s path from proposal to payment. Not a dashboard that updates once a quarter, not a PDF dump, but a living system that lets citizens, journalists, contractors, auditors and line employees see the same data, in near-real time, with names, amounts, dates, locations, documents and decisions side by side. I want to be able to click on a barangay’s flood wall and see the bid notice, the winning supplier, the contract, change orders, progress payments, site photos and the engineer’s acceptance report. If anything looks off — like a firm with no equipment repeatedly winning, or unit prices jumping between adjacent towns — I should be able to flag it, and that flag should trigger a followup.