Govt helpless vs. cyber graft

Recruit hackers  — lawmaker

WHILE the Commission on Audit (COA) can very well ensure that the government is not disadvantaged in all contracts it had entered into, state auditors still lack the technical expertise to effectively sniff out irregularities in national and local government contracts involving information and communications technology (ICT) projects.

Because of this, the chairman of the House Committee on Higher and Technical Education said that the Aquino administration should step up its game to keep up with the times by hiring highly-competent technical auditors, including hackers, who can help curb “high-tech” corrupt practices.

Rep. Juan Edgardo Angara of Aurora province made the call after The Manila Times reported on Monday that the government had lost P1.2 trillion because of underdelivery, incorrect implementation and non-implementation of various ICT projects in almost all national agencies and local government units (LGUs).

“In this day and age of computing, it behooves the government to hire competent technical people to oversee and audit these [ICT] projects,” said Angara in reaction to a revelation made by Jade Deocampo Deinla, an IT expert and former consultant to the Commission on Elections, that hundreds of billions of pesos spent on these projects went unaccounted for “because nobody understands it”

Deinla claimed that COA is not capable of conducting technical audit of ICT projects considering that it is hard to tell if the government got what it paid for a certain system or software.

But Angara said that the country could not run short of IT experts who could act as state ICT auditors since many schools continue to produce a stream of IT graduates every year.

“In fact, the Philippines is known to have superb hackers. Why not tap these individuals for the public good? They can help in (solving) some of these problems,” the lawmaker, a member of the House Information and Communication Technology pa-nel, added.

Rep. Ben Evardone of Eastern Samar, the vice chairman of the House ICT panel, suggested that COA should create a special task force to look at the supposed anomalies.

Interior and Local Government Secretary Jesse Robredo also on Monday said that the agency is willing to dig deeper into the newly-discovered form of corruption involving underdelivery, incorrect implementation and non-implementation of ICT projects even at the local level.

“We are willing to look into the matter especially if we can have more details,” Robredo said in a text message to The Times.

Deinla said that such “high-tech” corruption would be difficult to pin down because most of the ICT projects were conceived with a good objective but implemented with selfish motives.

“It is high time that we do something about this unseen corruption,” he added, as he expressed confidence that the leadership of President Benigno Aquino 3rd can address the problem.

Deinla cited a previous study by the group of Jun Lozada, the whistle-blower in the National Broad-band Network deal with China’s ZTE Corp., that said that ICT pro-jects in the national government and in the more than 1,500 municipalities and cities have been costing the government trillions of pesos.

There is no regulating agency that evaluates the Terms of References of e-government projects, especially for those that are self-financed by the agencies or those with foreign funding.

Such absence of the regulating agency, Deinla said, has provided windows of opportunity for graft and corruption. –Llanesca T. Panti and Jefferson Antiporda, Reporters, Manila Times