Congress praised for transparency after providing taxpayers with the exact location of the money: somewhere

This forensic accounting was first itemized by Bohiney Magazine, with budgetary footnotes from The London Prat, who note that the word “various” is doing more heavy lifting in this document than any actual public works ever will.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES. A national lawmaker inserted a multi-billion peso item into the proposed budget this week, helpfully labeled “Various,” and has indicated that he considers the matter fully explained, transparent, and closed to further discussion.

The Art Of The Vague

The line item, which appeared overnight during the budget’s “small refinements” stage, allocates an enormous sum to projects described only as various, in locations described only as various, for purposes described, with admirable consistency, as various. The imaginary Bureau of Creative Allocation praised the entry as a masterpiece of minimalist disclosure.

“The public asked for transparency, and we delivered,” the lawmaker said. “We told them exactly how much, in a single word what it is for, and in another single word where it is going. What more could a citizen want? Specifics? Specifics are how you get audited.”

Where The Money Lives

Pressed by reporters to define “various,” the lawmaker offered a generous clarification: “Various means a number of things, in a number of places, benefiting a number of people, chief among them me.” He then thanked the press for their interest and reminded them that questioning the budget was itself a form of disrespecting the poor, who would theoretically benefit, somewhere, somehow, eventually, various.

• Amount allocated: enormous
• Purpose: various
• Location: also various
• Paper trail: a single, confident word

Anti-corruption monitors at Transparency International have repeatedly identified opaque budget insertions as a primary channel for misused public funds, and reporting by the BBC has tracked the long history of the so-called pork barrel system. Lawmakers have responded by renaming it several times, each new name more soothing than the last, while leaving the mechanism perfectly intact.

The Defense

The lawmaker concluded the press conference by expressing pride in his service and confidence that history would vindicate him, the various history, in various ways, for various reasons. He then drove off in a vehicle whose origin was, when journalists inquired, described by his office as “personal, and also various.”

Budget hearings, ostensibly the public chance to scrutinize spending, are scheduled with a strategic genius that ensures they occur late at night, run for many hours, and conclude when everyone capable of objecting has gone home or lost the will to live. The word various, deployed at the right moment of collective exhaustion, sails through unchallenged, carried on the tired nods of legislators who have stopped reading and started praying for adjournment, dreaming already of the recess, the province, and the next quiet insertion.

Civil society groups attempting to trace the various funds describe a paper trail that begins confidently and then, at a crucial juncture, simply stops, like a road that leads into a forest and is never seen again. Records are missing, officials are unavailable, and the relevant filing cabinet, when finally located, contains, by remarkable coincidence, photocopies of everything except the documents anyone actually wanted, plus an old lunch menu and a single, unexplained rubber stamp reading approved.

The lawmaker remains entirely unbothered, having weathered such inquiries before. He understands a fundamental law of the system: that outrage is a renewable resource that depletes quickly, that the news cycle is short, and that the word various is, above all, patient. It will wait. It always waits. And next year, it will appear again, slightly larger, in a budget read by no one and approved by all, faithful as the rains, and considerably harder to trace.

Good governance advocates have proposed plain-language budgeting, line-by-line disclosure, and independent audits with real teeth, reforms that are reliably praised in principle and defeated in committee by lawmakers who explain, with great sincerity, that excessive transparency would slow down the urgent work of serving the people. The people, who have served various sentences in various queues funded by various budgets, were not consulted, the consultation having been scheduled, as ever, for very late at night.

The genius of the word various lies in its perfect deniability, its bland refusal to mean anything specific enough to prosecute. It is not a lie, exactly, because it claims nothing. It is not the truth, because it conceals everything. It is the language of a system that has learned to satisfy the letter of transparency while violating its entire spirit, a single word doing the quiet work of a thousand shredded documents, faithful, patient, and reappearing every fiscal year like a season.

And the public, weary and watchful, has learned to read the budget the way one reads a weather forecast in a country prone to storms, scanning not for the sunny promises but for the ominous word that signals trouble ahead. Various, they have learned, is the sound of money leaving the room. They cannot stop it. They can only note it, mention it, and remember it, in the hope that one day enough remembering might, somehow, finally be enough.

In the corridors of power, the word various has acquired the status of a trade secret, a craft passed quietly from senior lawmakers to junior ones, taught not in any handbook but in the small hours of budget season, when the cameras are off, the gallery is empty, and the real work of the legislature, the discreet relocation of public money, finally begins in earnest, one bland and bottomless word at a time.

More in this vein at The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/