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. 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 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 follow-up.

This isn’t utopian. Other countries have shown it can be done. Ukraine built ProZorro, an open-source e-procurement platform, after years of graft drained public trust. ProZorro mandates online publication of tenders, bids, awards and contracts, and its open data enables civil society to run independent checks. The World Bank has assessed the system as acceptable for use in development-financed projects and notes its legal mandate since 2016, with continuing upgrades for reconstruction. Researchers have also credited ProZorro’s “everyone sees everything” approach with real savings and fewer backroom deals.

Brazil launched a national Transparency Portal back in 2004, long before “open data” became a buzzword. It publishes detailed information on federal revenues and expenditures, transfers to states and municipalities and beneficiaries of programs, searchable and downloadable. The idea is simple: when the budget is visible to the public, misuse gets harder and honest officials gain allies. South Korea, meanwhile, runs KONEPS, a one-stop e-procurement system that covers planning, bidding, awards, contracting, delivery and payment while linking to hundreds of external databases. OECD reviews point to gains in efficiency and integrity because every step leaves a digital trace.

The Philippines isn’t starting from zero. We’ve taken steps with PhilGEPS and agency-level portals, and we rank respectably on some transparency measures. But public participation remains middling, and the newly exposed flood control mess shows how gaps are exploited. The International Budget Partnership’s 2023 survey gives the Philippines a public participation score of 33 out of 100, better than many neighbors, yet far from the kind of citizen involvement that can catch schemes early. If we want to stop insertions from morphing into overpriced riprap and “completed” projects that never existed, we have to move from scattered disclosures to end-to-end digital visibility.

What would that look like here? Start with a single public platform that stitches together the whole fiscal chain. The General Appropriations Act, budget releases, SAROs and NCAs, work programs, procurement plans, bidding documents, bid histories, contracts, variation orders, geo-tagged progress reports, acceptance and inspection forms and final payments should all live in one place with stable identifiers. Tie each project to a map and a timeline. Expose unit-cost catalogs so anyone can compare prices of gravel, steel or culverts across regions and years. Require suppliers and subcontractors to disclose ownership and related parties, then cross-reference those names against company registries and tax records. If a politician’s relative shows up in the beneficial ownership tree, that should be visible to everyone.

Make publication mandatory by law, with clear deadlines and penalties for noncompliance. Agencies that delay uploads should lose the ability to obligate new funds until they catch up. Give auditors read-write access for findings. Allow citizens to subscribe to alerts for specific projects or spending categories so they’re notified when a change order or payment is posted. Open up APIs so watchdogs, media and researchers can run their own analyses without begging for CSV files. And yes, protect privacy by redacting personal IDs, not the names of public officials or firms.

Procurement deserves special attention. The Ukraine and Korea examples show that integrity improves when every bidder sees the same information and every result is out in the open. We should mandate electronic auctions for standard goods, publish all evaluation scores and forbid opaque “post-qualification” maneuvers that can be abused. Every no-bid or negotiated award needs a detailed justification online, linked to the emergency or exception rule used, with automatic review by a central unit. Pair that with blacklisting that actually works: a company barred for collusion in one region shouldn’t reappear under a new name two provinces away.

We also need real-time risk flags. If a small contractor suddenly wins 10 flood control projects in adjacent districts, the system should raise a hand. If unit prices diverge sharply from the catalog, or if progress payments arrive without matching site photos and GPS tags, we should see warnings on the project page. Machine-assisted checks won’t replace auditors; they’ll help them aim faster.

Finally, transparency must be paired with consequences. When citizens can see the data, prosecutors and ethics bodies must act on credible signals. The recent flood control hearings and the swirl of testimony about kickbacks and ghost projects should end with cases filed and funds clawed back — not just headlines. If Abad’s alarm over massive insertions prompts deeper scrutiny of how last-minute budget changes feed corrupt networks, then digital transparency becomes more than a slogan, it becomes a guardrail.

I don’t want to marvel at another ribbon-cutting only to learn later that the structure was hollow. I want to open a public site on my phone, trace a peso from Congress to a culvert in my barangay and be able to say: this is where it went, this is who got paid, this is what we built. Other countries have shown that sunlight can be coded into the system itself. We can do the same, and we can do it now.

The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of his office as well as FINEX.

Reynaldo C. Lugtu, Jr. is the founder and CEO of Hungry Workhorse, a digital, culture, and customer experience transformation consulting firm. He is a Fellow at the US-based Institute for Digital Transformation. He teaches strategic management and digital transformation in the MBA Program of De La Salle University. The author may be e-mailed at rey.lugtu@hungryworkhorse.com