HEIDI MENDOZA, commissioner of the Philippines’s Commission on Audit, has been nominated to a senior position in the United Nations.

TAKING ON corruption is never easy. After two years of investigation by nearly three dozen lawyers of the Office of the Ombudsman reviewing thousands of documents, the corruption cases involving the use of pork-barrel funds against an incredible tally of legislators are far from being concluded. Many of the cases have not even reached trial stage.

EVEN THOUGH the Supreme Court (SC) had declared the pork barrel dead and unconstitutional in 2013, the Commission on Audit’s (COA) Annual Audit Report (AAR) would still show that P125.95 million of the legislators’ Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) sitting in a small agency, the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority or TESDA, during that year.

THEY ARE supposed to be top-rate technical vocational institutions (TVIs), which is why they bagged millions of pesos from the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority or TESDA.