THE COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS was deluged by election contribution and spending reports for the May 2013 elections, after the Commission started started enforcing campaign finance laws more strictly.
But while the volume of documents received by the Comelec was indeed overwhelming, the quality or the truthfulness and accuracy of these documents is another matter.
In our latest report on the 2013 elections, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism looks at the campaign spending declared by the candidates in their Statements of Election Contributions and Expenditures (SOCE), and compares these with the advertising reports submitted by media entities.
Unfortunately, much of the figures do not even match. The differences range from the hundreds of thousands, to the tens of millions of pesos.
This two-part report by PCIJ Research Director Karol Ann Ilagan was informed by databases that the PCIJ developed using information contained in 25 reams of documents that the candidates and their parties filed with the Comelec, or 12,500 pages of documents.
Read the first part of the story here.
The second part of the series, also written by PCIJ Research Director Karol Ilagan, looks into how 17 senatorial candidates and their parties splurged almost half a billion pesos on advertisements that are, well, technically not campaign ads, but suspiciously look and sound like such.
Read the second story here.