House briefing on DOH's 'deficiencies' in handling COVID-19 funds set Tuesday

The House briefing into the reported deficiencies of the Department of Health (DOH) in handling the P67.32-billion COVID-19 funds is scheduled on Tuesday, August 17, House committee on public accounts chairperson Jose Bonito Singson said Monday.

Singson will preside over the said briefing at 1:30 p.m.

Over the weekend, Speaker Lord Allan Velasco said state auditors are expected to brief House lawmakers regarding the alleged deficiencies of the DOH in utilizing the COVID-19 funds.

The DOH, for its part, said the funds are accounted for, and it is currently addressing the compliance issues and deficiencies.

Health Undersecretary Leopoldo Vega, chief of staff of the DOH Administration and Financial Management Team, sought to assure the public that no funds were wasted.

“The audit observations mentioned by COA for the DOH ending December 31, 2020 is not yet the final report and we can still rectify the noted deficiencies so we can improve the efficiency and processes in our system,” he said during a briefing Monday.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque III also denied that there was corruption within the agency.

Singson, meanwhile, said the inquiry should also include a close scrutiny of the activities of the state-run Philippine International Trading Corporation (PITC) which had been accused of hoarding over P11 billion in government money since 2017.

He said officials from the Commission on Audit should also discuss the 2020 annual audit reports of PITC, which has supposedly failed to deliver the procurement requests made by the DOH-Research Center for Tropical Medicine (RITM) that has advanced nearly P1 billion.

He noted that the report released by COA had shown that PITC "failed to construct in 2017 the proposed hospital for emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases although it has received from the DOH-Research Institute for Tropical Medicine a total P126-million for the project."

“The COA reports gave us a glaring yet sickening visual of how the PITC squandered an opportunity for our country to have a better fighting chance against the COVID-19 pandemic which started in 2020 or three years after the trading firm got the money to implement the projects,” Singson said.—AOL, GMA News