posted January 10, 2019 at 12:00 am

In September, President Duterte wanted to push government auditors down the stairs. Now he says he wants to kidnap and torture them.

After two and a half years we have conditioned our minds not to believe, at face value, everything that comes out of the mouth of the President. That in itself is hardly ideal—imagine not taking the words of your leader seriously. We do this still because the alternative is much worse: If we believed everything he said, then we would be convinced that our President is an irreverent killer and rapist, who is as likely to disobey rules as he is to make them up as he goes along. Mr. Duterte’s latest rant is once again against the Commission on Audit for supposedly making life difficult for local executives. “Those sons of bitches in COA. That COA, every time, there is always something wrong. What’s up with this COA? What if we kidnap someone from COA, we torture them here? Sons of bitches,” he said, ironically at a local summit on peace and order in Pasay City this week. Duterte, a long-time local executive before he shot to national popularity has said he sees audit processes as obstacles to governance. Reacting to the tirades, a former audit commissioner said in a Facebook post that from, the beginning, government auditors are clear about their mandate: They never intended to interfere, slow down transactions and especially create opportunities for corruption. “Our role is to give the chance to correct and improve how taxpayers’ money is used with accountability and how it can be open to feedback from everyone concerned,” she said in Filipino.The COA has flagged several transactions in the Duterte administration, among them the spending of the Presidential Communications Operations Office when the Asean summit was held here and the multi-million-peso advertisement deal between former Tourism Secretary Wanda Tulfo Teo and an entity owned by her brothers. The COA is a constitutional commission that is supposed to be independent of any other branch. While it is not perfect, while there could be some bad eggs and while it is in need of modernization both in facilities and mindset, many of its auditors are dedicated and hardworking. When they find red flags in a transaction, they reach out and obtain the side of that agency for an explanation. Sometimes they face risks just going about their work. They perform their tasks quietly and publish their findings without fanfare. This is not to say there is no room for improvement at the COA. There is merit to observations that it needs to be responsive to the need for emergency expenses in special situations. Still, all the caution stems from the need to safeguard public funds from the hands of greedy decision-makers in government who feel they are above scrutiny. It is unfair and unpresidential to curse at them and to threaten them with harm for simply doing their jobs. Good thing we know better than take the President seriously. We have learned that much, by now. Even the chairman of the COA seems to have caught on, merely advising his auditors “to stay away from the stairs.”