"My best guesstimate is that the military will try to blend in and learn the trade at Customs."
"My best guesstimate is that the military will try to blend in and learn the trade at Customs."
Although one big problem in the Bureau of Customs is certainly the issue of corruption, it is by no means the only one. There are other issues in the BOC that are also crying for reform.
Perhaps tired of the never-ending corruption allegations within the agency, the President has ordered the military to take control of the graft ridden agency. It has however, come under criticism from some quarters which is hardly surprising. This sort of experiment has happened before and ended in failure. Why the government this trying it again, we do not know. Maybe it has found a new formula that will work this time.
In the first attempt, new graduates from the Philippine Military Academy were assigned to the Customs bureau. Eventually, the system swallowed those bright young graduates which is exactly the words being used by President Duterte in describing what happened to Faeldon and Lapeña in the BOC—Honest people being swallowed by a corrupt system.
The President is well known for his partiality to military men. Maybe the President still believes that assigning men with proven integrity to inject some values can still reform a rotten and corrupt agency. It is unfortunately not enough.
The BOC is a snake pit. It is an agency where unscrupulous and corrupt people can become very rich quickly. There was this story about a BOC janitor who was charged several years ago for corruption. He was apparently found to have owned a sizable house and a couple of vehicles while receiving a janitor’s pay. How much more for the gods who run the bureau? We can only guess.
The average life span of a customs commissioner has not been long in the past several years. Faeldon did not last long and so did Lapeña. Eventually, these people will find themselves being charged for corruption which have happened to last three. We will have to wait and see what will happen to the new one who is another military man. It would also be interesting how the military will try to solve the corruption problem of the agency.
The Customs bureau is a complex agency populated by people with vastly different culture than the military. My best guesstimate is that the military will try to blend in and learn the trade.
The mafia within the Bureau, however, will simply run circles around them which means that it will be business as usual. And why is corruption so pervasive in the Bureau that it can easily swallow the most principled of men? In one study on the issue of corruption, organizations lacking in regulations and standard operating procedures are usually the ones susceptible to corruption. This is because it allows officials of that agency to play god.
For instance, although all shipment are supposed to be X-rayed, before release, we know that there are exceptions especially when there is port congestion. In the case of Mangaoang versus Lapeña, if the X-ray division did find something in the magnetic canisters, why were they not inspected? Why were they allowed to pass? Why the detection was was only revealed in the Senate hearing when there was already an intelligence report that there was the possibility of illegal drug smuggling? The X-ray division actually forms part of the intelligence gathering process because X-ray machines can detect suspicious shipments which is the reason why all shipments must be X-rayed with no exceptions.
Another thing that needs to be corrected is the single documentation process. In the Bureau, the document that is going out the BOC is different from the one going in. There is no better example of this than our imports from China. As far as Philippine officials records are concerned, the figure is about $15 billion. But the figure coming from China tells a different story. It is almost twice the amount at something like $29 billion. It is therefore, quite easy to calculate how much taxes the government is losing as a result of this malpractice. Clearly, the beneficiaries of this practice are corrupt bureau officials and the importers who will make a killing at the expense of the government and Juan dela Cruz.
The bureau therefore, must have to implement this single-document policy if it wants to collect all taxes due it. When the government can plug these loopholes that allow corrupt officials to play god, corruption in the bureau can be reduced and that is probably the best that government can hope for—simply to reduce corruption.
How about the tussle between Mangaoang and her boss Sid Lapeña? I think Senator Ping Lacson described it best when he said that Lapeña may have been promoted but to many, he lost some grounds on the confidence issue and credibility even if the President defended him vigorously.
The other thing that Lapeña lost is bragging rights. Being abruptly removed from a job even for promotion cannot entirely be viewed as positive. Maybe the President should have waited for some time before transferring Lapeña to a higher position so as not to give fuel to Lapeña’s critics and Mangaoang claiming credit for his ouster.
She is now in fact being praised by government critics as a dragon slayer and is now being offered protection in the witness protection program. There are now calls that Lapeña be charged for the P11 billion in methamphetamine that slipped through the customs by virtue of command responsibility. But it is not as simple as that. Malacañang has a definition of what constitutes command responsibility. Lapeña must first be proven to have done nothing after finding out about the missing illegal drug shipment.