The Commission on Audit has questioned the P569.38-million expenditure of the Davao City government without supporting documents and with inconsistencies with the Republic Act 9184 or the Government Procurement Reform Act.
In a 2017 annual audit report, state auditors said Davao City's P486.34-million inventory balance was of "doubtful validity."
Based on accounting records, CoA said the book of balances included P124.13 million worth of construction materials inventory and office supplies inventory at P69.5 million.
It added that the city government was not able to submit a summary of supplies and materials issued, authority to drop from the books and complete physical count of inventory items.
"We have observed that most of the account balances were composed of supplies and materials that were already consumed. These were mostly in the prior years, which were not dropped from the books due to non-submission of SSMIs," the audit report read.
The Commission said 93 percent of the P12.79-million balance in the food supplies inventory were already consumed as early as 2010, while only P6.26 million out of the general fund of the construction materials inventory remained unutilized.
"The foregoing conditions resulted to the overstatement of the Inventory and Equity accounts while understating the corresponding expense accounts, thus affecting the reliability of reported inventory balances in the financial statements," it added.
Sara Duterte-Carpio, presidential daughter, is the mayor of Davao City.
CoA assailed the authenticity of P13.58 million worth of transactions for the procurement of supplies for public elementary and secondary schools in the city for absence of accomplishment receipts for procurement and distribution list signed by the beneficiaries.
It called the attention of Davao City's local school board for its alleged failure to identify the intended beneficiaries of at least 50 units of air-condition units at P1.46 million and 50 units of projectors at P1.25 million.
"This deficiency encourages a higher susceptibility to bias if the selection of beneficiaries happens only during the implementation stage. The lack of documentation might also indicate misappropriations of property," CoA said.
Other observations done by CoA were the P10.18-million procurement of 300 Acer Veriton computer units, P400,000 purchase of 50 Epson printers and P212,750 acquisition of of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2016 software that were not delivered to the intended public schools,(P212,750.50) failed to be delivered to its intended public school-beneficiaries, and lack of information on the city government's P69.46-million infrastructure projects.
Mayor Duterte, however, had denied the CoA report.
In a statement, the mayor said the city had already complied with all the required documents and submitted them on time.
“The required document, information and/or comments or explanation were submitted on time to the CoA and all these matters were duly rectified and resolved,” Duterte said.
She added that the procurements allegedly flagged were the subject of the CoA Resident Auditor’s Audit Observation Memorandum issued prior to the conduct of the required Annual Exit Conference for the year 2017.
“It is noteworthy that there were no misuse or loss of public funds. As can be observed, no notice of suspension or disallowance was issued in relation to these CoA AOMs because we put high value on transparency,”
“Missteps, especially on erroneous or missing documents are immediately corrected to avoid doubt on the transactions. We are happy with the CoA reports because it helps us improve our system in transaction,” Mayor Duterte said.