Cited Laws
Accordingly, the duty to verify, specifically the post-audit duty, was performed by the Monitoring and Verification Division and the Management Information Systems Division. Per his recollection, a certain John Bola/Boladen was appointed as head of the division. He expounded that although the creation and plantilla for the Monitoring and Verification Division were approved in 1994 by the Department of Budget and Management, the OSS Center had to wait for the approval of the Civil Service Commission (CSC) which was granted only in 1995. [102] When confronted with the TCCs for Criminal Case Nos. 25619, 25623, 25624, 25625, 25626, 25627, and 25628, he confirmed that his signature appeared on top of the name of Andutan on the bottom left portion of the document. He claimed that he would sometimes sign for and on behalf of Andutan per the latter's instruction. It became their policy or practice that whenever one of the officials was unavailable and the 30-day period for processing the application was about to expire, the next most senior officer would sign for the absent officer to comply with the processing period. This policy also applied to requests for transfer of TCCs on behalf of Andutan and to tax debit memos on behalf of Belicena. As proof of this supposed policy, he presented and identified Central Office Order No. 97-03, Department Order No. 96-02 dated October 18, 1994, and Office Order No. 94-04 dated August 27, 1994, which while not expressly authorizing him to sign the TCCs, requests for transfers and tax debit memos involved in these cases, nonetheless expressed the tenor that he was previously authorized to sign for Andutan and Belicena. [103] As to whether the OSS Center still exercised control over a TCC once it had been issued to an applicant, he responded in the negative but said that the TCC can still be the subject of a post-audit, which was expressly stated on the lower portion of the document. [104] He further expressed that during his term, the period for post-audit was open-ended because the OSS Center initially intended for the COA to take over the audit at some point. No audits had taken place for the TCC involved in these cases because it took the OSS Center some time to fill up the positions in the Monitoring and Verification Division. [105] When asked if verification reports were attached to the TCCs before he signed them, De Vera said there were none. Despite this, he did not insist on conducting a verification before recommending the issuance of the tax credit certificate. He maintained that the verification was the function of the Monitoring and Verification Division and the evaluators were not instructed to perform independent verification. As far as he was concerned, his function was only to validate the application with respect to the mathematical computation of the tax credit and check the prescriptive period of the claim since the core function of their division was the appropriateness of the amount due to each c