A "SUPER" number of currupt government officials can still be found throughout the bureaucracy, according to Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, who is urging voters to choose in the May elections candidates with integrity if they want a clean government. Corruption remains prevalent in the government, Morales said, noting that her office had received thousands of complaints about graft and corrupt practices and other administrative violations. Most of the new cases filed last year involved local officials, a total of 1,092, while police officers accounted for more than 600 cases. Other officials who faced investigation by the Ombudsman include those from the military and the education, finance, natural resources, justice and agriculture departments, as well as state universities and colleges, and the fire protection and jail management bureaus. Morales’ statement came before the ranking of the Philippines in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2015 dropped 10 notches from 2014. The Philippine CPI ranking slid to 95th from 85th. The higher the ranking, the more corrupt a country is perceived to be. The country’s public sector got a score of 35 from experts and institutions that Transparency International (TI) had tapped. Countries that obtained a score of less than 50 have “serious corruption problem,” according to TI, which assessed 168 countries in the 2015 index. Read more: Ombudsman: So many in gov’t are corrupt | Inquirer News Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook
How exactly are voters supposed to know who the candidates with "integrity" are? Are the filed corruption cases made public? (I say filed because everyone knows it takes forever to get a conviction....which might not ever happen because, well you know, corruption.) Is such a list of corruption cases easily accessible on the internet? Is it broken down by Province/Municipality/City so voters can easily search for their local politicians? What if the newer candidate doesn't have a record but is part of a well established and corrupt political dynasty? (Perhaps Juan dela Cruz Sr has a long recorded history of corruption but little Juan Jr married into another political family and took their last name and is just now looking to get into politics to carry on the family business.) I'm sure the cases are available somewhere on the internet but searching for them is tedious and you have to know where to look and what to look for. I think anyone that opened up such a corruption watchdog website that exposed these politicians would have some serious safety and legal concerns (because defamation cases can be filed here even if the claim made is true....and these corrupt politicians have a lot of money to file as many cases as they like) and would need to operated from outside the Philippines.....and even then it would have to be ran as anonymously as possible.
I totally agree that the voting public has a right to know who all the corrupt officials are and exactly how corrupt they are. How else are the voting public supposed to know who will pay the most for their vote?
