The Department of Finance (DOF) has expressed confidence that the board of the Millennium Challenge Corp. (MCC) will consider the Duterte administration’s sweeping reforms to weed out official corruption and adhere to the rule of law in deciding on the eligibility of the country for another MCC assistance program.
In a statement, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III pointed out that “the Philippines remains firmly committed to the rule of law and strictly adheres to due process. The President has also made clear that his platform of government will be based on zero tolerance for corruption in government.”
“In its first year in office, the Duterte Administration has actually been relentless in the campaign against corruption in government,” Dominguez said.
Dominguez noted, for instance, that President Duterte cleansed the corruption-plagued Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) in just weeks after assuming office by replacing its prison guards with elite personnel from the Special Action Force (SAF) of the Philippine National Police (PNP), and last month issued an executive order creating the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC) to investigate administrative cases of corruption involving presidential appointees.
The Duterte administration also set up the 8888 Citizens Complaint Hotline in October last year to receive complaints against corruption and inefficiencies in government, among other measures, Dominguez noted.
He stressed that “the Philippines’ partnership with the MCC can contribute to making progress in terms of maintaining the country’s growth momentum, improving competitiveness, institutionalizing good governance, and moving closer to our shared objective of inclusive growth.”
The MCC compact is only one of the many streams of US assistance that flows to the Philippines.
“The Philippines remains one of the largest recipients of US assistance in Asia. The US values the partnership of the Philippines on shared interests, especially in countering violent extremism, and in promoting stability across the region,” Dominguez said.
“The scorecards are only one of the factors that the MCC Board takes into consideration when making reselection decisions. We are confident that the Board will take into consideration relevant information and recent data on our very deliberate efforts to improve the ‘control of corruption and adherence to the ‘rule of law,’ indicators,” Dominguez said.
Dominguez noted that there were “inherent time lags” in the third-party data used by the MCC in assessing the annual country scorecard for the Philippines.
“The data on which the ‘Control of Corruption’ indicator was based and released in September 2017 primarily covers the events of 2016,” Dominguez said.
The MCC website states that its country scorecards use “information collected from independent, third-party sources” for “an objective comparison of all candidate countries.”
According to Dominguez, in the Philippines’ case, the “‘Control of Corruption’ and ‘Rule of Law’ scores, for example, were based on an aggregation of quantitative assessments and perception surveys that were collected by the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators in conjunction with the Brookings Institution based on information for the events of 2016.”
“We have been informed that we are at the median level in these two indicators, which we believe we can improve as we work together with the MCC to enlighten them about our effective efforts to weed out corruption in the Philippine bureaucracy,” Dominguez said.
The Philippines was re-selected for consideration of a second MCC “compact” or aid grant, a full six months before the first compact was concluded.
