POLICE BEAT: News reporters sent to cover Congress these days end up reporting not on vital legislation but on police investigations.

In the Senate, some minority members spend valuable time drawing circles around the imagined criminal intent of their fellow lawmakers instead of presuming good faith and crafting legislation pertaining to public works and essential services.

In the House, where money measures originate, some congressmen and their allies are sinking their teeth into an audit report that some funds intended for improving farm harvests had ended up in the pockets of unqualified recipients or had been misused.

Congressional inquiries, when conducted in aid of legislation, are important to lawmaking. But in many cases, they just taper off as “Probes to Nowhere” and are put aside when lawmakers who had initiated them notice waning media interest or publicity.

*      *      *

DEAD HORSE: In the Senate, senators Jamby Madrigal and Panfilo Lacson are still beating a dead horse: that Senate President Manuel Villar “inserted” an extra P200 million into the 2008 budget for the C-5 Road with intent to defraud the government.

It is curious that economist Benjamin Diokno, who was Budget Secretary under former President Joseph Estrada, was not looking at Villar. Instead, he surmised that the second P200 million was “inserted” to give President Gloria Arroyo “access to an amount easily classifiable as savings.”

Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile, finance committee chairman, said he had allowed the second outlay on top of an earlier P200 million appropriated by the House. That was not “insertion” in its malicious sense, he explained, but a normal amendment of the budget bill.

He said that while it is the Executive Department that proposes the national budget bill, Congress — without exceeding the original total figure submitted — normally scrutinizes, refines, and sometimes realigns proposed outlays along what it considers to be wise use of public funds.

*      *      *

HONEST MISTAKE: A super cop before turning senator, Lacson has failed to detail how he thought Villar planned to steal the second P200 million. Neither has his jumpy buddy, noted for her embarrassing bum steers, been able to pinpoint what crime the Senate president had committed.

Emilia Boncodin, who until she joined the so-called “Hyatt 10” was Budget Secretary under President Arroyo, had a more plausible explanation: the second P200-million appropriation for the C-5 Road was an honest mistake.

She observed that the members of the bicameral committee — whose report, incidentally, was signed by Lacson himself — must have included the amount in the final budget version thinking no appropriation had been made yet.

Unable to point to any crime by the Senate president, Lacson and Madrigal are now straying to other subjects — such as the Villar family’s real estate business — in a bid to distance themselves from their “bombshell” that has dropped as a dud.

*      *      *

MORE NEEDED: It has turned out that there was actually no duplication. Manuel Bonoan, a senior public works undersecretary, said the two similar outlays were for two different components of the same C-5 project — the SLEx flyover and the Manila-Cavite coastal road.

The flyover is a 300-meter, four-lane structure to be built in front of the SM shopping mall on Sucat Road in Parañaque. The other component is an 800-meter, six-lane roadway in Las Piñas.

There is no such thing as a major public works project, something as gigantic as the C-5 realignment, that requires only P200 million. The second P200 million in question was just augmentation, not a duplication of the first amount.

Public works officials said that in addition to the two P200-million outlays, more than P3.5 billion would still be needed to complete the ambitious project beyond the 2010 end of the term of President Arroyo.

*      *      *

COA REPORT: Protest groups in and out of Congress, meanwhile, are having a field day blasting the Department of Agriculture for alleged irregularities in some farm productivity programs cited by the Commission on Audit in its 2007 report.

The COA report, however, is not the last word on the matter. It is subject to review and clarification. The agriculture department itself has launched a full-dress investigation to pinpoint wrongdoing and punish the guilty parties.

To avoid perception that they have been using the COA report as another excuse for Arroyo-bashing, the supposedly pro-farmers groups citing the report may want to wait for the DA to release its findings.

Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap has assured the public that the findings of the nine-member audit panel looking into the COA-listed discrepancies will be announced in a few days. Asst. Secretary Eduardo Nolasco is the chairman and Director Vero Librojo of DA legal services the vice chairman.

*      *      *

FUNDS FROZEN: Yap said the panel would dig deeper into the accountability of DA regional field units in the areas where the COA had pinpointed discrepancies in project implementation.

Instructing the regional directors to act on the COA-raised issues, Yap suspended fund releases to private beneficiaries such as non-government organizations (NGOs) and people’s organizations (POs) pending the updating of guidelines covering disbursements.

Among those questioned in the COA report were fund transfers to NGOs and other private groups that have partnered with local governments in implementing DA projects for food security.

Yap said, however, that the DA values its ties with NGOs and private foundations, as these have helped substantially in carrying out programs at the grassroots. But he said it would be prudent to suspend fund transfers to NGOs and similar organizations pending the DA probe.

* * *