WHEN CONGRESS IMPEACHED then Chief Justice Renato C. Corona on December 12, 2011 because he had allegedly filed an intentionally flawed Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth (SALN), it was a signal for public servants that the document they submitted each year was not to be trifled with.
And when Corona was found guilty by the Senate impeachment court of excluding a substantial portion of his assets in his sworn SALN, transparency in the details of their income and wealth became a clear obligation – and strong public expectation – of all public officials, but especially of the justices of the Supreme Court.
Based on the contents of their 2011 SALNs, however, this lesson seemed to have been lost on the justices of the high court. Not only have most of them apparently underdeclared the true amount of their income – in law, salaries plus allowances – in their SALNs, half of them declined to answer questions about these.
For this joint story project with Solar Network News, the PCIJ validated the data enrolled in the justices’ 2011 SALNs with corporate records and the SALNs that they had filed in prior years.
PCIJ then wrote 14 of the justices separate letters to clarify the apparent disparities in the data enrolled in the various documents. Half or seven of them replied to the PCIJ’s queries.
The other seven, including Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes P.A. Sereno, and Associate Justices Bienvenido L. Reyes and Estela M. Perlas-Bernabe – all appointees of Preisdent Benigno Simeon C. Aquino III – refused to be quizzed about the details of their wealth. Senior Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio did not respond, too.
But in its recently released Report on Salaries and Allowances for 2011 (ROSA), the Commission on Audit ranked the high court justices among the top 200 best paid, out of 6,489 senior public officials in 864 government agencies in the country.
The 2011 ROSA reveals that seven of the 14 justices are receiving allowances of more than half a million pesos each, and the others, at least P312,000 each. In addition, four justices are being paid more than P2 million in other benefits, incentives, and bonuses.
Of the 10 justices who put a figure in the annual income column of their 2011 SALN form, six declared that they received only P1.08 million to P2.9 million.
Left out was a slew of allowances, bonuses, and benefits that apparently fattened the justices’ take-home pay by two to three times more, or from P2.22 million to as much as P4.63 million.
Part 1 of our report looks at the disparities between the income that 10 justices declared in their SALNs (four others did not disclose at all) and the data enrolled in COA’s 2011 ROSA. It comes with two sidebars: The COA’s ROSA story, and a ‘Money Talk’ guide.
Part 2 looks at the tax implications of this windfall of extra pay that the justices received in 2011.
Part 3 reviews the details of the assets and liabilities of the justices, as they had declared in the 2011 and prior years’ SALNs.
Part 4 focuses on the implications of the unyielding resort to secrecy by the court on transparency, accountability, and integrity of the judiciary – supposedly the main reasons why Congress voted a year ago to impeach a chief justice.