When the Watchers Fail: DPWH Builds Nothing, COA Notices Nothing

By Louis ‘Barok‘ C. Biraogo — August 27, 2025

WHAT a miraculous discovery in the Philippines: a P55.7-million riverwall in Bulacan that exists only in government ledgers. The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) 1st District Office swears it was built, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) released the full payment by June 30, and SYMS Construction Trading happily accepted taxpayer pesos. And yet, when President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. visited the site on August 20, there was nothing but weeds, mud, and the stench of corruption.

But don’t worry. Everyone in power insists it isn’t their fault.

Rep. Terry Ridon, chair of the House Committee on Public Accounts, clutched the National Expenditure Program like a holy relic and proclaimed:

This isn’t a congressional insertion! The executive put it in the budget!

The implication: legislators just sign checks without asking questions. Marcos, meanwhile, thundered in front of cameras, labeling it a “ghost project” and vowing to blacklist SYMS Construction — as if the DPWH, under Secretary Manuel Bonoan, didn’t approve the contract, as if the DBM didn’t authorize the disbursement, as if Malacañang itself weren’t the origin of the project in the first place.

This is the Filipino political blame game at its most grotesque: Ridon hides behind paperwork, Marcos hides behind theatrics, and the agencies actually responsible — the DPWH district engineers who signed off on completion certificates, the COA auditors who missed the red flags, the DBM officials who released funds without physical verification — all melt conveniently into the shadows.

But let’s be clear: this isn’t paperwork gone astray. It’s a betrayal of flesh-and-blood people. What does P55.7 million buy in a country where classrooms have no chairs and rural clinics lack antibiotics? In Bulacan, it was supposed to buy a reinforced concrete wall to hold back floods. Instead, families in Purok 4, Barangay Piel are left exposed. When the next typhoon barrels in — and it will — the waters will rise, the houses will drown, and the poor will be left wading through chest-deep sewage because their government preferred ghost projects to real protection.

The scandal here is not just one missing wall. It is systemic rot. We’ve seen it before: license-renting contractors like St. Timothy Construction cornering dozens of contracts, engineers signing “as-built” certificates for projects that were never started, district offices inflating costs while siphoning off kickbacks. The Bulacan case is not an anomaly. It’s business as usual. A haunted bureaucracy producing ghost projects, with DPWH and favored contractors running a lucrative side business in phantom infrastructure.

And yet the president’s remedy is to order audits and blacklists. Spare us. Blacklisting SYMS means nothing when the same owners can reincorporate under a new name next week and win another DPWH bid. Audits pile up in the Commission on Audit archives like dust in a library, unread and unenforced. What Filipinos need is not another angry site visit or a splashy website for whistleblowers but structural reform.

Here’s what that would look like:

A public, real-time project tracker with geo-tagged, time-stamped images before every peso is released.
Criminal prosecution of DPWH district engineers who signed fraudulent completion certificates, not just wrist-slaps.
Whistleblower protections so that honest staff in DPWH or COA can expose anomalies without ending their careers.
A ban on license-renting, enforced with jail time for both the “lender” and “renter” firms.
Automatic suspension of DBM officials who authorize payments without physical verification.

Until that happens, expect more hauntings. Because let’s be honest: Marcos’s fury makes for good TV, Ridon’s finger-pointing makes for good political cover, and Secretary Bonoan’s silence makes for good bureaucracy. But for the people of Bulacan, it makes for another year of floods.

And when the river swells again and lives are washed away, the water will not stop to ask whether the blame lies with Congress, the DPWH, or Malacañang. It will simply rise — drowning the poor first, while the powerful stay dry in their mansions.

That, not the ghost wall itself, is the true national scandal.