BEING BYPASSED would certainly sting, but there is really no reason for Department of Interior and Local Governments (DILG) Secretary Ronaldo Puno to fret should he fail to be confirmed before Congress goes on recess on Thursday.

After all, the President has already said that he will simply reappoint Puno if the DILG chief is bypassed. Puno may also find comfort in the fact that despite all the bluster and bravado shown by members of the Commission on Appointments (CA) during confirmation hearings, they have rarely shown nominees the door out of the bureaucracy.

Records show that Commission rejected only a few of the total 6,173 new and re-issued appointments it reviewed from 1987 to June 24, 1999. Indeed, it disapproved a grand total of two, and withheld action on just nine. It did bypass 4,195 of the total number of nominations and appointments it received. But this is mainly because most nominees had to be issued several ad-interim appointments and were ultimately confirmed.

For this work, the Commission gets millions of pesos from taxpayers. In 1995, it had a budget of P84.7 million. This year, its budget has almost doubled at P150 million.

Critics of the Commission say the taxpayers are getting shortchanged, considering that the body almost always acts as if it were a mere rubber stamp of the appointing power.

To be sure, the CA’s policy, based on its rules, is to "accord the nomination or appointment weight and respect….and that all doubts should be resolved in favor of approval or confirmation". The assumption behind this is that the President carefully considers the fitness and qualifications of the people he appoints.

But the CA’s other duty is to "act as restraint against abuse of the appointing authority, to the end that the power of disapproval should be exercised to protect and enhance the public interest." A Commission that succumbs too easily to the executive or is made up of people determined to pursue their own personal agenda will obviously fail in this area.

Senator Juan Ponce Enrile laments that the CA system has become very politicized. "There are some who want to show how important they are, how powerful they are, and then they want to get the most out of their present membership in the commission," he says.

After all the shouting is over, however, the result is almost always the same: The nominee gets confirmed, even if sometimes the process stretches into months.

Going through the CA process, to say the least, is not for the faint-hearted. Neither is it for those who have a lot to be defensive about. The process can be intrusive, and whatever negative information unearthed can be played up or covered up, by the lawmakers, depending on the appointee’s relationship with them.

A nominee is required to submit 40 copies of at least nine documents delving into his family background, health, schooling, career, assets and liabilities, and relationship with any elected or appointive government official. Candidates are also required to dig into their records of income tax return for the previous four years, to secure clearances from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) and the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR).

Each CA member gets a copy of these papers. No hearing can take place until all the necessary documents are submitted.

But Catherine Bello, who served as CA secretary for four years, says that while members of the Commission are "spoon-fed" with facts about the people appearing before them, few of those present at a confirmation hearing actually do their homework. Unless, she says, the member happens to have some special interest in the nominee.

Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago admits as much. "I am under the impression," she says, "that no member of the commission reads the resumé and background materials for the nominee until we are already seated in public, and for lack of anything better to do, we all look at the resume of the person seated before us."

Arguably, with such unpreparedness and apparent disinterest, members of the Commission make themselves all the more vulnerable to the formidable pressure coming from Malacañang.

The Palace is known to have has its own way of campaigning for the confirmation of the President’s nominees. Commission insiders even say that in some instances, Estrada himself has called up CA members known to have objections against certain appointees, in an effort to persuade them to change their minds. There have also been times when the President has coursed his appeals through Presidential Legislative Liaison Office (PLLO) chief Jimmy Policarpio, says Senator Blas Ople.

Ople recalls that when his committee on foreign affairs was deliberating on the appointment of businessman Jose Oledan as ambassador to Spain, Estrada sent word that he "needed help" to have Oledan confirmed. "Oledan was a strong supporter of the President," says Ople. Kapag ganoon nakikialam ang presidente, pero hindi naman kami obligadong tumulong (But even when the President intercedes, we’re not really obligated to help)."

Senator Enrile puts it another way: "Normally you accord due courtesy to the appointing power, unless there are palpable indications of lapses in the selection of the person being nominated."

But this caveat has been apparently ignored during the confirmation of many of Estrada’s appointees. Indeed, the CA seems to have repeatedly turned a blind eye on the findings of the Appointments Review and Investigation Division (ARID) that should have at the very least prompted a closer scrutiny of the nominees.

Given that "integrity" is supposed to be one of the yardsticks for a nominee’s confirmation, discrepancies in submitted income tax payments should raise red flags at the Commission. But this has yet to happen. Comments former Senate President Ernesto Maceda: "Somehow, most members of the Commission, probably accepting the fact that most people lie on their ITRs (income tax returns), don’t consider that a major defect. I guess the feeling is that everyone cheats anyway."

Energy Secretary Mario Tiaoqui, for instance, reported an unchanging annual income of P70,000 from 1994 to 1996, according to a confidential report submitted by ARID to CA members. The figure went up to P75,000 in 1997. Also during that time, Tiaoqui’s loan receivables rose by P6 million.

ARID’s accountants noted that Tiaoqui’s financial documents "do not account for the increase." Tiaoqui, who has a Master in Business Administration from Cornell University and is a resident of the exclusive Dasmariñas Village in Makati, reported a net worth of P56.3 million in 1997. ARID’s accountants pointed out that Tiaoqui’s bank loan account rose from P35.5 million in 1995, to P43.9 million in 1998.

Congressman Faustino Dy raised several questions about Tiaoqui’s finances, mainly on how he was able to secure a bank loan of P37.9 million on a P70,000 annual income. But the discussion quickly shifted to other matters, and the queries were soon forgotten.

ARID also found flaws in the statement of assets and liabilities filed by Executive Secretary Ronaldo Zamora, whose net worth rose by P22.5 million, from P18.5 million in 1994 to P42 million in 1997. According to an ARID report, the increase could not be justified by Zamora’s reported sources of income, based on his ITR submissions for the past four years.

Before Zamora’s confirmation hearings began, Policarpio reportedly confronted an ARID official, in the presence of other CA secretariat officials and asked him whether the report could still be suppressed. A CA employee present in that meeting says Zamora explained rather irritably that the P22 million in question came from the stocks he owned.

Policarpio denies the meeting took place. Even if it did, subsequent developments proved that Policarpio’s concerns were unnecessary. The issue was not even mentioned in the hearings.

CA insiders, though, say Estrada has found a very effective PLLO chief in Policarpio, who was once the Commission’s secretary. Being more than familiar with the CA process, Policarpio helps ensure that all appointees submit all the required documents, and quizzes them on all possible questions that may be raised during hearings. But his main job is to deal with the staff who used to work under him, with the aim of getting the executive department’s appointees clinch the CA’s imprimatur.

Policarpio often approaches CA members who may pose a hazard to an appointee’s confirmation, and sends the message back to the candidate. "I simply try to talk to the nominee and see how they can rectify what could be the stumbling blocks to their confirmation," he says, adding that most of these cover government policies that should be corrected.

"If there’s a quid pro quo (of a personal nature), I am not a party to it," says Policarpio. "My responsibility is basically to get the opposing CA member and the appointee together." But he also says, "I will be a hypocrite if I say there’s no horse-trading (in the CA)."

Ople, meanwhile, insists that the CA does go over the documents submitted by the nominees, as well as the ARID reports. He says, "Kung lumilitaw naman sa mga papeles mo na ikaw ay estapador, manggagantso ng kapwa mo o hindi ka nagbabayad ng buwis, hindi ka papasa (If it is revealed that you don’t pay your debts or your taxes, you wont pass)."

Yet more often than not, the few members of the Commission who do take pains to scrutinize, say, the tax records of appointees wind up exasperated. At one point, Enrile, while questioning a nominee about inconsistencies in his financial record, was visibly irked by a comment implying that his queries were immaterial because the committee had endorsed the candidate.

"If we are going to railroad or expedite the confirmation of people," said the peeved Enrile, "in spite of the fact that there are clouds in their documentation, then we may as well not hold any hearings."

Some members of the public who took time to lodge complaints against the confirmation of recent nominees also say their efforts were wasted on a Commission that seemed to have already made its mind up to bestow its blessing on the appointments.

Beau Baconguis, advocacy officer of the green group Haribon, expresses dismay over what they encountered in the CA during the confirmation hearings of Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Antonio Cerilles.

Cerilles’s nomination had not gone down well among environmentalists, many of whom had even viewed him as a violator of the country’s green laws. But as early as the first hearing, Baconguis says some CA members had already ditched all semblance of neutrality. Congressman Simeon Datumanong even asked all Mindanao lawmakers at the hearing to stand up, declaring that "most of the Mindanao legislators are supporting the confirmation of Secretary Cerilles."

Baconguis also recalls that during breaks, members of the Commission would call Cerilles for meetings. In addition, the committee deliberating on the DENR chief’s nomination held several executive sessions, shutting out the public.

"Many of those who sat in the CA were trying to convince us not to oppose anymore," adds Baconguis. "They said if he was going to be a bad DENR chief, he could be replaced anyway."

In fairness to the CA, there have been a number of nominee oppositors who can only be described as "nuisances," such as people who have lost a court battle against a nominee and are thus looking for another arena in which they could continue their fight. But this hardly seemed to be the case with most of Cerilles’s oppositors. And what happened next to five of the more prominent non-governmental organizations that were trying to block his confirmation was unprecedented.

Not long after their appearance at the Cerilles hearings, Haribon and four other NGOs were told by friends at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that a lawmaker was looking into their corporate registration papers. Days later, a newspaper article came out, in which Congressman Faustino Dy warned that five NGOs that had appeared before the CA were in hot water for "misleading the commission about their true corporate status." He said the NGOs were "delinquent" in filing their information sheets, lacking or late in filing their financial statements, and failed to have their by-laws registered on time.

"These delinquent NGOs trifled with the precious time of the CA in its constitutional mandate to pass upon judgement on the competence and integrity of President Estrada’s nominee for the environment portfolio," Dy was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

In the end, Senator Loren Legarda, chair of the CA’s committee on natural resources, decided that all the issues presented by the oppositors were "based on policy differences between the oppositors and Cerilles," and that these were "simply matters beyond the competence" of her committee.

Cerilles was finally confirmed last March 24. Some four months later, he hit the headlines once more, this time for allegedly hiring 221 consultants during his first nine months in office. He has since been dodging criticisms for proposing to build roads around mountains—to make it easier for lawmen to run after illegal loggers, he says—and to provide firearms to forest rangers.