I MEAN we will never get rid of corruption here since we have not installed the necessary machinery to fight graft, just as floods will be a permanent part of Filipinos’ misery if the government doesn’t allocate funds to build the infrastructure that would rapidly remove rain water from the flood-prone areas.
As in the case of many of the noble instructions of our Constitution — think of its anti-dynasty provisions — Congress has never given the main institutions tasked to fight corruption, the Ombudsman’s Office and the Sandiganbayan anti-graft court, the financial resources necessary to do their work
Seems logical of course: Why would a corrupt institution like the Congress fund the infrastructure that would rid the country of graft? Indeed, the ghost flood control scam has exposed several legislators, including the former House speaker Martin Romualdez, as having profited immensely from this.
A comparison with Hong Kong and Singapore, two Asian jurisdictions that successfully transformed public sectors once afflicted by widespread corruption, reveals a weakness in our anti-corruption machinery that has received surprisingly little attention: the severe shortage of personnel assigned to investigate and prosecute corruption.
Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) employs approximately 1,400 personnel to serve a population of 7.5 million. That translates to 18.7 anti-corruption personnel for every 100,000 inhabitants.
Our Ombudsman, by comparison, had only 1,192 personnel as of September 2026, serving a population of approximately 117 million. That is just 1 personnel per 100,000 Filipinos. Hong Kong therefore has more than 18 times as many anti-corruption personnel per capita as the Philippines, which has 19 per 100,000 residents.
There is also the picture of a very weak Ombudsman compared to Hong Kong’s ICAC in terms of the two institutions’ budget per capita. The ICAC for the 2024–2025 fiscal year had a budget equivalent in peso terms of P1,363; the Ombudsman’s Office for 2025 calendar year had a measly P50.
Even more astonishing is that the Philippine Ombudsman has 2,439 authorized positions, yet 1,247 of these — 51 percent — remain vacant. The agency has not even filled half the positions that the government itself has determined it requires.
Factor
One factor is that four years of active law practice is required to be an Ombudsman lawyer. After four years though, a lawyer would be either making more money in private practice than the entry-level Ombudsman’s post-tax P100,000, or he is already a lawyer in a firm that offers future lucrative salaries. Or he could be an incompetent lawyer from an obscure law school, who’s likely not to pass the requirements to be an Ombudsman lawyer.
However, even if the Philippine Ombudsman filled every authorized position, it would have only 2.08 personnel per 100,000 Filipinos — roughly one-ninth Hong Kong’s staffing intensity.
These data raise the fundamental question about the seriousness of Philippine administrations’ professed determination to eradicate corruption. A government may repeatedly declare war against corruption, but what credibility can those declarations have if its principal anti-corruption agency cannot even recruit the investigators, prosecutors and other personnel it is authorized to employ?
Hong Kong’s experience is particularly instructive because corruption was once so deeply embedded in its public administration that bribery had become almost a routine part of everyday transactions. During the 1960s and early 1970s, police officers collected protection money from illegal gambling operators, drug syndicates and other criminal enterprises. Public officials demanded payments for services that citizens were legally entitled to receive.
The turning point came in 1973, when the discovery of unexplained wealth accumulated by police chief superintendent Peter Godber provoked public outrage. Godber fled Hong Kong, but was subsequently extradited from Britain and convicted in 1975. The scandal prompted the establishment of the ICAC in February 1974, removing responsibility for investigating corruption from the police, whose own officers had been deeply implicated.
Investigation
The ICAC adopted a strategy combining investigation and prosecution support, prevention of opportunities for corruption and public education. Its investigators were given substantial powers to examine financial transactions, trace illicit assets and pursue officials suspected of receiving bribes. Its prevention specialists studied government procedures to identify opportunities for bribery, while its education programs encouraged citizens to report corruption.
Within a generation, Hong Kong had substantially transformed its public administration. The essential achievement was not simply imposing severe punishments. It made the probability of detection and prosecution sufficiently credible that corruption became a much riskier undertaking.
Singapore followed a somewhat different route, although its underlying principles were similar. Its Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau was established in 1952. After Lee Kuan Yew’s People’s Action Party assumed power in 1959, the government strengthened the bureau’s authority through the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1960.
Singapore combined rigorous enforcement with reforms intended to reduce both incentives and opportunities for corruption. Its civil service emphasized merit-based recruitment, professional standards, administrative discipline and compensation designed to attract capable personnel. The government simplified procedures and strengthened financial controls. Its anti-corruption system extended to private-sector bribery.
Neither Hong Kong nor Singapore eliminated corruption completely. Both continue to experience corruption cases, including those involving prominent individuals. But their experience demonstrates that corruption is not an unavoidable characteristic of Asian societies. But reducing it requires huge and well-funded institutions capable of investigating wrongdoing and governments willing to support those institutions even when investigations become politically inconvenient.
Hearing
At the September 2026 Senate budget hearings, Remulla disclosed that his office had 4,219 pending cases as of June 30: 1,955 criminal cases, six forfeiture cases and 2,258 administrative cases. Some cases, he acknowledged, had been pending for as long as 15 years, creating the danger that they would eventually be dismissed because of excessive delays.
Recruiting personnel could take seven to eight months because of screening requirements and government hiring procedures. The office had recruited 60 lawyers during the year and expected another 40 by November. Yet Remulla conceded that filling all vacancies could take approximately three years. The problem is therefore not merely appropriations; the Ombudsman’s Office must also possess the organizational capacity to recruit, train and deploy personnel effectively.
Yet even if the Philippine Ombudsman filled every authorized position, it would have only 2.08 personnel per 100,000 Filipinos — roughly one-ninth Hong Kong ICAC’s staffing intensity.
Worse for us, an official convicted by the Sandiganbayan as a result of the Ombudsman’s efforts will likely appeal to the Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court. Of course, the accused would need to have a huge loot to fund his lawyers, an incentive to steal big-time. The original Ombudsman prosecutors may also have already been assigned to other cases, resigned from it, or even bribed, resulting in these cases’ being weakened, or even sabotaged by bribed prosecutors.
The recent Supreme Court acquittal of Imelda Marcos in seven graft cases illustrates the problem. In 2018, the Sandiganbayan convicted her over financial interests in foreign foundations associated with the Marcos fortune. Eight years later, the Supreme Court reversed the convictions because the prosecution had failed to establish essential elements and properly authenticate crucial documents — which astonishingly are basic SOP in prosecution.
The Marcos couple has become grafters’ role models, and I’m sure the son will, too. Corruption in this country has become a low-risk, high-returns endeavor. Graft during the Marcos authoritarian regime involved tens, even hundreds of millions of pesos stolen. Under Marcos Jr.’s administration, it involved tens of billions of pesos. Before, graft money was delivered in envelopes, maybe in briefcases. Now it is delivered in tens of suitcases.
Scandal
The flood control scandal provides a contemporary test. By Oct. 12, Ombudsman Remulla reported that his office had filed 39 criminal cases in court involving 52 accused persons, including allegations of plunder, malversation and graft. The ultimate measure of success will not be the number of charges filed or the prominence of those accused. It will be whether investigators can trace the money, prosecutors can prove individual responsibility, courts can resolve cases without unreasonable delay and final judgments can be enforced.
The question is not how many corrupt officials our leaders promise to imprison. It is whether the government has built an anti-corruption machinery capable of proving their guilt in court — and doing so within a reasonable time.
There is currently no political will nor popular demand to create the machinery powerful enough to eradicate or even just contain corruption in this graft-infested country, as without that machinery we can only rely on President Marcos’ hypocritical solution to the problem that he gave in his 2025 State of the Nation Address, addressed to unnamed corrupt officials: “Mahiya naman kayo!” (You should be ashamed of yourselves).
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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