Flood-to-pocket project in MacArthur Leyte?
A ₱145-million flood control project in Brgy. Tuyo has been declared “100 percent complete” according to a billboard carrying the Commission on Audit’s seal.
But on the ground, barangay chairman Nicky Matol says there is nothing but grass, soil, and silence. No trenches, no embankments, not even the mark of a backhoe.
The contractor, PAFJ Construction and Supply Inc., is now at the center of suspicion for what residents call a ghost project—a glaring contradiction between paper declarations and physical reality.
The billboard states the project began on April 10, 2025 and is already finished. Yet the barangay chief’s testimony paints a very different picture.
A flood control structure of this scale should leave obvious traces of construction—concrete walls, riprap, drainage channels, excavated embankments.
Instead, the site resembles untouched farmland. The absence of visible progress raises the question: if the project is allegedly complete, where did the ₱145 million go?
Under government infrastructure protocols, funds are typically released in tranches tied to progress.
Contractors often receive a ten percent mobilization fund at the start, followed by successive thirty percent releases for excavation, earthworks, and midterm structures, another twenty percent for finishing works, and a final ten percent retention payment upon turnover.
If this template was followed, then up to ₱130 million may already have been disbursed. The problem is that no exact disbursement schedule has been made public. The Department of Public Works and Highways Region VIII has released no ledger of payments.
There are no geo-tagged photos, no certified reports, no third-party inspection records. What exists is only a billboard proclaiming success over an empty lot.
The situation is not unique to Leyte. In Bulacan, the Commission on Audit recently flagged ₱341 million worth of flood control projects as either substandard or non-existent.
Nationally, the agency has already begun a performance audit of flood control programs, citing repeated anomalies in implementation. The pattern is unmistakable: inflated contracts, premature declarations of completion, and taxpayers left with nothing but billboards while communities remain vulnerable to disaster.
To dismiss the Brgy. Tuyo case as clerical error would be dishonest. Declaring a barren field as “100 percent complete” is a brazen insult to public trust.
It demands urgent disclosure of fund releases, project documents, and inspection certificates.
If these records show that money was released for work that never existed, then both the contractor and the public officials who allowed it must be held accountable under the law.
Flood control is not cosmetic infrastructure. It is a lifeline for towns like MacArthur, which are battered annually by typhoons.
Every peso stolen from these projects is a peso stolen from the safety of families. Until the full money trail is exposed and the truth laid bare, the “completed” flood control in Leyte will stand not as progress, but as a monument to corruption.
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