House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Ivan Blanco, in an interview, said they will review “a large volume of documents and we are going to do our best to look into the issue.”
Aside from the Ways and Means Committee, Speaker Blas Jonathan Attao also tasked the House Committee on Judiciary and Governmental Operations to be involved in the investigation.
Blanco said there are two important “criteria” in carefully reviewing the documents — the authenticity of receipts and other documents that the House minority bloc submitted to the House leadership last month, and proof that the reimbursements had been paid.
Blanco said he will also use the standards of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Yellow Book in reviewing the documents from the Department of Finance.
He said the Yellow Book is “the general review/inspection standard” in probing the authenticity of documents and whether or not amounts of money were actually drawn down.
A House minority bloc member, Rep. Tina Sablan, said members of the community should expect public discussions and debates about what the records show and what should be done.
She said the investigating committees and the House minority bloc will also issue their reports.
“In the coming week, the Department of Finance is expected to turn over voluminous records sought by the House Minority, the Ways and Means Committee, and the Committee on Judiciary and Governmental Operations as part of ongoing investigations of numerous questionable expenses charged by Gov. Ralph Deleon Guerrero Torres to the Commonwealth government, and the policies (or lack thereof) that govern such expenses,” Sablan said.
She noted that some of these expenses have already been published online by Kandit News and submitted to the House in official communications, but the legislative inquiries seek a more comprehensive set of records.
Sablan, House Minority Leader Edwin Propst, and the other minority bloc members — Reps. Edmund Villagomez, Richard Lizama, Donald Manglona, and Sheila Babauta — made an Open Government Act request on Dec. 10, 2019 for financial records pertaining to, among other things, the governor’s travel allowances and reimbursements.
“We specifically asked for records related to the governor’s travel, official representation, housing and utility allowances, reimbursements, and executive security services. Under the OGA, Finance had ten calendar days to comply,” Sablan said.
On Dec. 19, 2019, acting Finance Secretary Margaret Bertha C. Torres asked for more time, and the minority agreed to extend the deadline to Jan. 6, which is today.
The Ways and Means and JGO committees made the same request to Finance, and set their own deadline for Jan. 6 as well.
