Access to Information.

BUYING THINGS in small portions — “tingi-tingi” — is popular among Filipinos, but Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Rogelio Singson is clearly not a fan of…

IT SEEMS the heads of five government corporations would not be the only ones on the chopping board for implementing the anomalous pork barrel projects recently reported by the…

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…

SOME TRANSPARENCY online, but also some opaque and chaotic disbursement practices offline: That seems to be the sorry story so far of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM)…

Last of Three Parts WHILE MOST of the tycoons who bankrolled candidates and political parties in the 2010 Presidential elections were curiously absent, the 2013 midterm elections…

Second of Three Parts LAWYERS ARE taught early on to make the distinction between companies and their officers and shareholders. But Rona Ann Caritos, acting Executive Director of…

First of Three Parts IN THEORY, elections are supposed to be the great leveler or equalizer of democracy. The vote of any ordinary man scraping a living off the streets is supposed…

FOR THE 2013 midterm elections, a company called the International Global Mining Exchange (IGME) donated P5 million to the campaign kitty of deposed President Joseph Estrada’s…

LAGUNA GOVERNOR Emilio Ramon ‘ER’ Ejercito never got to have the success in the film industry that was enjoyed by his uncle Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada. But in the May 2013 elections, he…

Laguna Governor Emilio Ramon ‘ER’ Ejercito. Photo courtesy of laguna.gov.ph. LAGUNA IS supposed to be his clan’s ancestral province and he already enjoyed formidable name recall…

IMPLEMENTING THE Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) takes a long and layered process because it is a lump-sum item, which means that its purpose has yet to be identified…

BOTH VETERANS of the “parliament of the streets,” they mounted separate failed, if high-level and issues-focused, campaigns for the Senate in the May 2013 elections. Yet while Ana…

Last of Two Parts WHO GETS VOTED is just half the story of elections. Who finances the campaign, who gains or loses money, and by how much, are the more salacious pegs to the…

First of Two Parts THE OPULENT names of tycoons and captains of industry, as well as of firms ranked among the country’s top 500 by sales and revenue, used to populate the list of…

THEY WERE supposedly set up to uplift the lives of those in need. Yet in their first few months of operation, they served a rather different, yet specific, purpose: to promote the…

THE BUREAU OF INTERNAL REVENUE (BIR) says it will investigate leads from the interactive database that reveals names of people from more than 170 countries, including the…

FREEDOM of expression (FOE) and freedom of information (FOI) are closely intertwined, fundamental rights of the people, not just in the Philippines but also in all democracies of…

A PERFECT zero. That’s the score of the so-called “Gods of Padre Faura” – the justices of the Supreme Court – as well as those in the Court of Appeals, the Sandiganbayan, and all…

WHAT follows is an account of PCIJ’s correspondences with the Office of the Secretary General and the Records Management Service of the House of Representatives, which as discussed…

Is the President still part of the solution, or is he now part of the problem? Advocates of the Freedom of Information (FOI) bill raised this question after Malacanang again failed…

THE apparent inability of majority of Metro Manila local governments to respond quickly and fully to citizen requests for asset disclosure records of local officials, as well as…