AT LEAST 20 congressmen, four governors, and 26 mayors elected in May 2013 should promptly vacate their office for failure to submit reports on their donors and expenditures within deadline and according to the prescribed forms, the Commission on Elections (Comelec) en banc ruled this week.

POLITICAL PARTIES and candidates spent billions of pesos in the last May elections, and it’s only expected that some of that money would have headed in the direction of the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR). Yet even though ‘tis nearly the season to be merry, there still seems to be no joy in the tax bureau when it comes to collecting the appropriate taxes related to the polls held more than half a year ago.

A month after President Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III announced his intention to abolish PDAF, however, this much-hyped “new mechanism” for disbursing pork barrel funds in lieu of the deletion of the PDAF by name is evidently still a work in progress.