Value of SALN in campaign finance

As many election and governance advocates would say, campaign finance is the first step by which the people can tell whether a candidate, once elected into office, would do well in a public post and in handling public funds. A cross-checking of campaign finance submissions with wealth declarations should be able to provide better contexts towards this end. 

But reporting on these connected documents is not as easy as it may seem. For one, both are self-reporting mechanisms and, as such, allows the candidates and elected officials to report only those that they want to report – for whatever reason. Although this may not generally be the case, such practice has been proven time and again, what with the case of former President Joseph Estrada, in discrepancies in his wealth declarations back in 2000, and in the case of Emilio Ramon “ER” Ejercito, in discrepancies in his campaign finance submissions in 2013.

Further, the shrinking trend in accessing SALN of public officials had proven to pose hindrances in reporting on the wealth of public officials. The latest of these restrictions is an Ombudsman Memorandum Circular that prevents access to SALNs under its safekeeping unless requested by the filer themselves, authorized by the filer, or if summoned by the Ombudsman’s Field Investigation Office, Bureau or Unit for purposes of a fact-finding investigation. The Office of the Ombudsman is the repository of SALNs of a significant number of high ranking public officials including those elected to a national office, such as the president and vice president, and in the local government units including governors, vice governors, mayors, and vice mayors.

To be fair, while the Office of the Ombudsman may have the strictest and strangest policy in providing access to wealth documents, it is not the only SALN repository that restricts access of the public to a document that is legislated to be public. The House of Representatives, the Lower House of Philippine Congress, have long rejected requests for SALN coursed through the House Secretary General – the official repository of wealth documents of district and party list representatives. But the House Secretary General would at least provide a summary of the wealth declarations of the members of the Lower House. Requesters seeking details of these declaration may request directly from the filer. In 2018, the Senate followed suit, providing only summaries of wealth declarations of senators veering away from their long practice of making copies of the senators’ SALNs accessible to the public.

Although not concerning elected officials, even the judiciary would not allow a peek into the SALNs of the justices of the Supreme Court. Just last year, the Supreme Court denied requests for access to the SALN of Associate Justice Marvic M.V.F. Leonen filed by the Office of the Solicitor General. While that may seem as a likely move to hinder attempts to file quo warranto petitions against justices, it also sets precedents in preventing access of the public to wealth documents of justices in general. And unfortunately, such has been the experience of PCIJ in its many attempts to secure copies of the wealth documents of the magistrates.

But access to wealth documents is just one side of the equation — the other side being access to campaign finance documents. Relative to other government agencies, the Comelec is more open when it comes to the public’s access to election documents. Since 2019 however, moves to systematize the public’s access to campaign finance submissions have resulted in several difficulties including the charging of fees for every document that you would like to get your hands on. Just recently, PCIJ requested for copies of the political advertisement contracts submission of media outfits. An incomplete set of documents, only because the rest have yet to be prepared, already amounted to almost PhP8,000 or around USD167.

By 2016, the Commission would also begin redacting information in campaign finance documents in the context of the Data Privacy Act of 2012 which posed difficulties in analyzing the documents. For example, redacting the Tax Identification Number or TIN of the campaign donors takes away the opportunity to identify whether donors who may be declared with different first names — using either complete first name or nick name – but with same surname, can be one and the same. More oddly, the first wave of these redactions included the amount that donors contributed to the candidates’ campaign funds.

The Commission eventually saw that there was no logic in providing access to public documents when critical information have already been redacted — but only after requesters asserted that this verbatim application of the Data Privacy Act denies information-users the complete contexts of the documents. And that in turn, it is an outright violation of the people’s right to information.