Sara Duterte declared zero. The AMLC found P6.77 Billion.

The detail that started everything was not in the headline section of the Commission on Audit report. It was buried in the Notes to Financial Statements, a single line showing P125 million in confidential expenses for an office that had no legislative budget for secret spending.

Journalists covering the COA beat caught it. Legislators ran with it. And what began as a footnote has since grown into impeachment proceedings, P448 million in disallowed funds, and a question that no spokesperson has yet answered: how does a public official run billions through her accounts while declaring zero cash in the bank for six straight years?

How P125 Million appeared from nowhere

When Vice President Sara Duterte took office in 2022, the budget she inherited had been prepared under Leni Robredo, an administration that never requested confidential funds for the OVP. There was no line item for secret spending. None.

By December of that year, P125 million had appeared in the OVP’s financial statements anyway. The money came from the Contingent Fund of the Office of the President, transferred to a budget line that legal experts argued did not exist. Former COMELEC Chairman Christian Monsod and former Finance Undersecretary Maria Cielo Magno called it a “clear usurpation” of Congress’s power of the purse.

The more alarming question was not where the money came from. It was how fast it left.

Representative Stella Quimbo, then senior vice chairperson of the House Committee on Appropriations, corrected earlier reports that the P125 million had been spent in 19 days. Speaking on behalf of COA as its budget sponsor in the House, she said the funds were spent not in 19 days, but in 11. That is P11.36 million a day, every day, on activities the OVP has never been able to document to COA’s satisfaction.

On August 8, 2024, COA issued Notice of Disallowance No. 2024-002-100 covering P73.28 million of that amount. The disallowance covered confidential expenses from December 21 to 31, 2022: P69.78 million paid as “rewards” to informants with no documentation proving the underlying intelligence or surveillance activities had succeeded, and P3.5 million spent on tables, chairs, desktop computers, and printers with no link to any confidential operation. The OVP filed a petition for review. COA denied it in a ruling dated April 10, 2026, signed by COA Chairperson Gamaliel Cordoba and Commissioners Mario Lipana and Douglas Mallillin. The order is now final and executory, though Duterte can still seek relief from the Supreme Court.

An additional P375 million from the 2023 confidential budget was also disallowed in a separate ruling dated March 31, 2026, covering three cash advances of P125 million each released between February and September 2023. The total restitution obligation now stands at P448 million.

What the AMLC found

As the confidential fund case moved through the courts, a separate disclosure arrived from the Anti-Money Laundering Council. On April 22, 2026, AMLC Executive Director Ronel Buenaventura testified before the House Committee on Justice that banks had filed 630 covered transaction reports and 33 suspicious transaction reports involving accounts held by Duterte and her husband, lawyer Manases Carpio, from 2006 to 2025. The total value of the flagged transactions reached P6.77 billion, broken down into P3.77 billion linked to Duterte’s accounts and P2.99 billion to Carpio’s.

Covered transactions are those involving cash movements exceeding P500,000 in a single banking day. Suspicious transactions are flagged by banks when amounts are inconsistent with an account holder’s declared financial profile.

Among those P6.77 billion in flagged transactions, the AMLC confirmed that P230.87 million moved through the accounts specifically between 2019 and 2024, the exact years Duterte declared no cash on hand or in the bank in her SALNs.

The Duterte camp’s response came from spokesperson Atty. Michael Poa, who made two arguments. First, that the P6.77 billion figure is aggregate, meaning deposits and withdrawals are counted together and the same peso can move more than once. Second, that the cash in bank was not absent from Duterte’s SALN but was instead “lumped under others.” Both are fair technical points, and they are worth saying plainly to readers.

But neither closes the gap. They explain the methodology. They do not explain six years of zero.

The SALN says zero

A review of Duterte’s Statements of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth from 2019 through 2024, submitted to the House justice committee by the Office of the Ombudsman, shows the same entry under “Cash on Hand and Bank Deposits” every single year: nothing. Not a reduced figure. Not a footnote explaining the gap. Zero, for six consecutive years, even as her declared net worth climbed from P55.6 million in 2019 to P88.5 million in 2024.

If the cash was indeed “lumped under others,” then the SALN has a labeling problem that the Vice President has had six years to correct and has not. If it was not there at all, the question is where it went. Either way, P230.87 million in transactions moved through her accounts during those same years without a corresponding entry in her public financial disclosure.

We, the Filipino people, are entitled to ask what that means. The SALN is not an accounting exercise. It is a constitutional requirement, a public record, and one of the few instruments citizens have to assess whether those who hold power are using it to enrich themselves.

Here is what the public record shows:

• P125 million in confidential funds appeared in a budget with no legislative authorization for secret spending.
• That amount was spent in 11 days, confirmed by COA.
• P73.28 million was disallowed on August 8, 2024 for lack of documentation; the OVP’s appeal was denied April 10, 2026.
• P375 million more from 2023 was disallowed on March 31, 2026. Total restitution obligation: P448 million.
• AMLC recorded 630 covered transactions and 33 suspicious transactions in accounts linked to Duterte and her husband from 2006 to 2025, totaling P6.77 billion.
• P230.87 million of those transactions occurred between 2019 and 2024, the exact years her SALNs showed no cash on hand or in bank.
• The House Committee on Justice found probable cause to proceed to an impeachment trial.

The answer she owes

Duterte has chosen to respond through press releases and social media rather than testify under oath. Her position is that her record is clean, her assets properly declared, and the proceedings politically motivated.

She may be right about the politics. That does not make the numbers wrong.

Why did a public official with hundreds of millions moving through her accounts every year declare nothing in the bank, by any label, for six straight years?

That is not a legal question. It is an accounting one. And it is one the Senate, when this case reaches it, will have to put to her directly, under oath, on the record.