By Justine Irish D. Tabile, Reporter
THE Makati Business Club (MBC) said the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) needs to harness artificial intelligence (AI) in investigating corruption in public works.
“They are under a lot of pressure to produce instant results. They (need to) work with the low-hanging fruit, which is essentially all of the cases already investigated by the Congress,” MBC Executive Director Rafael ASG Ongpin told reporters on the sidelines of the Arangkada Forum last week.
“Beyond that, there’s a lot of investigation that needs to be done. And we have suggested to them that they explore the use of AI in order to classify these transactions,” he added.
The group has floated the idea to ICI member and former Public Works and Highways Secretary Rogelio L. Singson, Mr. Ongpin said.
Corruption “is constantly happening; we have, for instance, several major multinationals that are pulling out of the Philippines. And one of the issues is corruption and red tape,” he said.
“We are engaging with the government about this and saying, ‘What’s the point of attracting more foreign direct investment if you can’t keep the ones who are already here?” he added.
He expressed optimism that the ICI will get results.
“The members are people of tremendous reputation and integrity. We are very happy about that. In fact, we had been working with Roger Singson in the Philippine Budget Coalition way before this thing blew up,” he said.
“But they have a huge job; we are talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions. They do not have the manpower at this point to scrutinize each of those transactions individually,” he added.
He said the MBC is working with civil society groups and the Philippine Budget Coalition in monitoring such transactions.
“Our role is to do the difficult and tedious work of monitoring. A lot of this starts with the national budget, so we are monitoring the deliberations on the national budget,” he said.
“We are making sure that they are not making last-minute insertions for discretionary infrastructure spending, which translated means pork barrel. That was what happened with the 2025 budget, so we are trying to make sure that we don’t get it in the 2026 budget,” he added.
Meanwhile, the MBC is also asking the government to review the current procurement process, he said.
“We have said publicly that obviously the procurement process is not working because nakakalusot ito (things have been getting through), so we have called for a review of the procurement process,” he said.
“Maybe not a review of the law but at least look at the execution and try to design something where mahirap makalusot,” he added.