G.R. No. 171481 - CORAZON C. BALBASTRO, VS. COMMISSION ON AUDIT, REGIONAL OFFICE NO. VI. D E C I S I O N - Supreme Court E-Library

Ruling

Accordingly, the Court of Appeals, by Decision dated April 29, 2005, set aside the challenged Ombudsman decision insofar as it directly imposed on petitioner the penalty of dismissal. On motion for reconsideration of the Ombudsman, however, the appellate court - on the basis of this Court's ruling in Ledesma v. Court of Appeals [5] that the Ombudsman has the power, not only to determine the administrative penalty of an erring public official, but also to compel the head of the agency concerned to implement the penalty imposed promulgated an Amended Decision dated January 18, 2006 which affirmed the Ombudsman's imposition of the penalty of dismissal against petitioner. Without filing a motion for reconsideration of the Amended Decision, petitioner filed the present petition. Petitioner asserts that the Court of Appeals erred and gravely abused its discretion when it held that she was not denied due process in the proceedings before the Ombudsman and that the Ombudsman decision was supported by evidence and applicable jurisprudence. Petitioner maintains that she was denied due process and that the proceedings before the Ombudsman were attended by serious irregularities. Thus she claims that she had not been furnished the sworn complaint of COA Region VI, thus giving her the mistaken impression that OMB-VIS-ADM-2000-0441 merely involved the allegations in the letter-complaint dated February 12, 1999 mentioned earlier; and that the letter-complaint, which requested for a comprehensive audit of the ICNHS, merely dwelt on the matter of late remittances to the GSIS, PAG-IBIG and BIR, hence, those were the only matters she responded to in her Answer filed with the Ombudsman. The petition fails. If indeed petitioner was not furnished a copy of the sworn complaint of COA Region VI, she could have easily manifested the same in her Answer; instead, she remained totally silent thereon and went on merely to argue that the allegations in the letter-complaint were then the subject of a pending case before the DECS. Petitioner could not have mistaken the letter-complaint of the INCHS Teachers and Employees Association to be the complaint referred to in the December 11, 2000 Order of the Ombudsman. Not only was COA Region VI the named complainant in the case title as set forth in that Order. The main body of the Order itself directed petitioner "to file your counter-affidavit and controverting evidence to the herein attached complaint filed against you by COMMISSION ON AUDIT, REGIONAL OFFICE NO. VI, " the capitalization and underscoring of which are found in the original Order. Petitioner, moreover, filed a Supplemental Answer in which she discussed matters that certainly strayed beyond those tackled in the letter-complaint of February 12, 1999 a fact which petitioner admitted in her Reply filed with this Court only after respondent raised it as an argument in its Comment. Again, petitioner made no mention in that Supplemental Answer of the alleged failure of