Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon on Tuesday said he would oppose the budget for the government's anti-communist task force for next year as he warned that their funds could be used for the 2022 elections.
Drilon, the Senate's chief fiscalizer, said the programs of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict or NTF-ELCAC are being done by other departments.
The task force has a budget of P19.2 billion this year, but Drilon said he received information that it could be doubled to P40 billion for 2022.
"I'll try to talk to my colleagues to explain to them why we should not allow this budget for next year because of being an election year. I think the fact of the opportunity to use this for election purposes is very clear," he told reporters in a virtual interview.
"The projects that are supposed to be done by the NTF-ELCAC, the activities are all over the bureaucracy... So why is it with the NTF-ELCAC?" he added when asked if he would seek a zero budget for the task force.
The NTF-ELCAC was created through Executive Order 70 issued by President Rodrigo Duterte in 2018 aimed at ending the "local armed communist conflict" in the country.
The task force earlier said 99% of the P16 billion allocated for its Barangay Development Program has already been distributed to more than 800 barangays that have been cleared of insurgency.
Drilon called on the Commission on Audit to check the use of the funds, saying that some of the projects under the program are prone to corruption including livelihood and skills training programs, assistance to indigent individuals, educational assistance, among others.
“These soft programs are often the source of corruption as we have seen in the past. The COA knows the history of fertilizer fund scam and the TESDA ghost scholars. This is exactly the kind of system that is prone to corruption,” he said.
Reportr sought the NTF-ELCAC's comments on Drilon's statements but the task force has yet to respond.
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