Citizen Participatory Audit (PH0046)

What is the public problem that the commitment will address?: A weak public financial management system leads to the inefficient and ineffective use of public funds. This results to unresponsive government projects that constrain the achievement of national development goals and outcomes at the national government level; and, of the objectives of programs/projects/activities at the level of implementing agencies. There is a general mindset among citizens that their role in governance is that of a mere “spectator” and not of an active participant. The auditors have difficulty compelling agency auditees to implement audit recommendations. The acquisition of technology skills by auditors is at a slower pace than the development of new technology. Civil society (CSOs/citizens) acquires skills on new technology faster. However, public auditors are more knowledgeable with governance processes such as public financial management.; What is the commitment?: Expansion of the coverage of the CPA to include not only performance/compliance audit engagements and the related capacity building activities, but also in the following areas: 1. Validation of implementation of audit recommendations, both by COA and CSO representatives, and citizens of the community; 2. Conduct of CPA Dialogues to obtain citizen inputs for the COA’s Strategic Planning and Audit Planning.; How will the commitment contribute to solve the public problem?: The main objective of CPA is to strengthen and sustain the engagement of citizens and COA in participatory audits and avail of other entry points for citizen partnership. By continuing to partner with citizens in conducting performance/compliance audits and availing of citizen partnerships in other areas, the COA gives more voice to citizens and empowers them to become more actively involved in activities to improve good governance. Experience showed that involving citizens in the public audit processes tend to make auditee agencies more compliant with audit recommendations thereby resulting in improved quality in the delivery of services. Partnership with citizens facilitates knowledge and skills exchange between the COA and CSOs/citizens.; Why is this commitment relevant to OGP values? Transparency – by including citizens as part of the public audit process, COA systems and processes are made transparent by giving citizen partners the same access to documents as state auditors and by giving citizens first-hand knowledge of how the COA does its audits. Audit reports are also widely disseminated through the COA website (www.coa.gov.ph) and the i-kwenta website (www.i-kwenta.com) Accountability – Putting in place a mechanism for continuous policy formulation to translate new CPA experiences to operational policies will provide a clear accountability system for both COA and its citizen partners. In addition, the presence of citizens as members of COA audit teams opens to the public abuses of public officials in audited institutions. Participation – CPA has various entry points for citizen participation: as members of audit teams, as partners in capacity building activities, as partners in shared agenda building for strategic planning and audit planning, as partners in validating implementation of audit recommendations. Technology and Innovation – The COA will include in the CPA processes the activity of simplifying audit reports through the use of data analytics and visualization. In addition, the COA intends to expand the involvement of citizens through a tie-up with the College of Geodetic Engineering, University of the Philippines, for students and their advisers to provide technical assistance to the COA in activities that can be facilitated with the use of technology.; Additional information: This is also in line with Chapter 5 of the Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022 on Ensuring PeopleCentered, Clean, and Efficient Governance particularly on the aim to fully engage and empower citizens.

3. Expand and institutionalize citizen participatory audit

Commitment text from action plan:

“Expansion of the coverage of the CPA to include not only performance / compliance audit engagements and the related capacity building activities, but also in the following areas:

• Validation of implementation of audit recommendations, both by COA and CSO representatives, and citizens of the community;
• Conduct of CPA Dialogues to obtain citizen inputs for the COA’s Strategic Planning and Audit Planning.”

Milestones

1. "Issuance of Commission Proper Resolution institutionalizing and enhancing the CPA
2. At least 1 activity to validate implementation of audit recommendations is conducted annually
3. At least 1 CPA Dialogue is conducted and the data considered as inputs in the COA’s Strategic Planning and Audit Planning annually
4. At least 1 CPA audit conducted for each of the 3 Audit Sectors, annually
5. Passage of CPA bill in the Senate on third and final reading"

Editorial Note: For the complete text of this commitment, please see Philippines’ action plan at https://www.opengovpartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Philippines_-Action-Plan_2017-2019_updated.pdf

Context and Objectives (Commitment Design)

This commitment aimed to sustain, institutionalize, and expand the Citizen Participatory Audit (CPA). Public auditing in the Philippines confronts the challenge of insufficient resources and low public support. Approximately 7,000 state auditors are expected to audit 61,000 government agencies. ^[37] According to the action plan, these public auditors find it difficult to compel auditees to implement their recommendations. This is crucial because, if implemented, the public audit could serve as an important function of checking inefficient use of public resources and curbing corruption. The Commission on Audit (COA) is constitutionally mandated to “ensure accountability for public resources, promote transparency, and help improve government operations, in partnership with stakeholders, for the benefit of the Filipino people.” ^[38]

CPA had also been a commitment in the Philippine OGP national action plan for the previous three cycles. CPA became a platform for citizens to participate and become deputized as public auditors, thereby acting as a force-multiplier in the audit process. The direct involvement of citizens led to positive gains: CPA checked whether projects were beneficial to citizens, and those audited were more receptive of audit recommendations when citizens were part of the audit team. Furthermore, the COA noticed that auditees implemented recommendations faster, sometimes even before receiving the final audit reports. ^[39]

For this CPA commitment, the milestones of continuing the efforts to institutionalize, expand, and sustain the conduct of CPA were not new; the same or related milestones had been included in the past plans but covered different sectors, programs, and time periods. Milestone 1 commits to a CPA in each of the national, local, and corporate audit sectors. The new milestone (2) was to conduct the validation of agency response to audit recommendations. The main OGP values that this commitment addressed were civic participation and public accountability, especially given the new milestone on checking the response to audit findings. This commitment is specific enough to verify, as completion can be determined by the issuance of Commission Proper Resolution, whether CPA audit and dialogues are held, and whether the CPA Bill is passed into law.

Previous action plans focused on putting CPA into practice and delivering participatory audits across sectors. This commitment builds upon previous efforts and aims to institutionalize CPA at full scale and expand CSO involvement to include the validation of audit recommendations. The two most significant elements to ensure CPA’s long-term sustainability are the issuance of Commission Proper Resolution and the official passage of the CPA Senate bill, which was in its third and final reading at the time the commitment was developed. This represents a significant step forward and also incorporates elements from an IRM recommendation from the 2015–2017 Action Plan IRM progress report. ^[40] This report suggested the validation of agency actions on recommendations as crucial to building evidence that government services and programs are improved when an agency acts on or responds to CPA recommendations.

Commitment Implementation

This commitment’s implementation was substantial at the end of the implementation period. According to government’s end-of-term self-assessment report, ^[41] all the activities were completed or substantially advanced, except milestone 5 (passing of the CPA bill in Philippines’ Senate). Particularly relevant to OGP values, dialogues to generate inputs for COA’s Strategic Planning and Audit Planning were carried out in Metro Manila, Luzon, Davao, and Cebu (milestone 3). ^[42] The government issued COA Resolution 2018-006 on the “adoption and Institutionalization of the Citizen Participatory Audit in the Commission on Audit” and also carried out “validation of implementation of audit recommendations, both by COA and CSO representatives.” ^[43]

This commitment resulted in marginal improvements in civic participation and public accountability through citizen participatory audits. CPA has been a permanent strategy in the COA since 2012. ^[44] Therefore, activities carried out during the implementation period largely continued and institutionalized existing CPA processes. CPA reports online list the government, CSO, and citizen participants in audits conducted in the national, local, and corporate audit sectors. However, many of these reports predate the implementation period. ^[45] Moreover, while the government noted that validation of audit recommendations was carried out, it did not provide any evidence of the role citizens played in the process. CSO were also not available to respond. ^[46] This commitment would have achieved “major” early open government results had the IRM found evidence that CPAs conducted during the implementation period resulted in greater government accountability. Examples of public accountability would include investigations into misused funds or changes to government programming as a result of CPA findings.

The commitment also led to a marginal change in government practice in the context of civic participation. Since 2012, COA has increased CSO and citizen involvement throughout the audit process to include the design of audit tools, to policy formation, to data gathering, to simplifying and disseminating audit reports. This commitment expanded citizen involvement to also include the identification of CPA goals and projects through CPA Dialogues. According to COA’s website, “during these Dialogues, representatives of the COA, CSOs, and other external stakeholders were able to share their aspirations and goals for the CPA as well as identify programs, projects, and activities that they want to be audited.” ^[47] According to records on the COA website on citizen audits, CPA Dialogues took place in Palo Leyte (Visayas), Batangas City (Luzon), and Zamboanga City, all of them at the end of 2019. ^[48] However, as specified in the resolution institutionalizing CPA, these events were “annual one-day activities,” and therefore do not represent sustained practice of civic participation in the country.

Next steps

The IRM shared the following recommendations with stakeholders during the prepublication review period for the design section of this report. They are included below for public record. ^[49]

Some key areas to consider for CPA in future action plans are:

• CPA could target critical processes with broader impact on public sector integrity, such as procurement or programs with greater potential of scale, including those implemented or undertaken by various government agencies at different levels, such as education or health. The commitment should articulate how it can address these multisectoral and multilevel processes and programs.
• As previously recommended in the 2015–2017 IRM progress report, ^[50] the validation of agency actions on recommendations is crucial to building evidence that government services and programs are improved when an agency acts on or responds to CPA recommendations. This can be done through a process that seeks to uncover the facilitating and hindering factors to agency action on CPA recommendations and the extent of impact of CPA recommendations on the overall performance of the agency/ program.