The Office of the Vice President (OVP) defended the creation of the Vice Presidential Security and Protection Group (VPSPG) following the Commission on Audit’s (COA’s) report regarding the number of VPSPG personnel last year.
COA reported that there are a total of 433 people served as part of Vice President Sara Duterte’s security and protection group in 2022. According also to the COA’s 2022 annual audit report on the OVP, of the 683 personnel under its manpower roster for the year, 63 percent or 433 individuals were part of VPSPG.
It also reported that the OVP’s total personnel for 2022 was composed of 174 individuals occupying plantilla positions and 509 individuals in non-plantilla positions.
In a statement, the OVP stated that COA found no adverse findings on the creation of VPSPG.
Based on the summary of the vice president’s engagements from July 1, 2022, to August 2023, there are a total of 558 VPSPG personnel deployed in NCR, Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao as well as in Singapore and Brunei.
The OVP said the deployment of VPSPG personnel largely depends on the assessment of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Philippine National Police (PNP). The OVP thanked the AFP and PNP for supporting the VPSPG and OVP.
An initiative of Vice President Sara Duterte in June 2022, the VPSPG was created to have a group independent from the Presidential Security Group (PSG).
“It will wholly provide all future Philippine Vice Presidents with necessary security and protection, a fundamental task that it will inevitably perform even when the Vice President and the President face the misfortune of having a relationship strained or broken by political differences and troubling situation we have seen during the past administration,” it said.
The OVP also said that apart from being the second-highest elected official of the country, Duterte is also the Secretary of the Department of Education, the co-vice chairperson of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), a task force organized by the government of the Philippines to respond and raise awareness to the ongoing communist rebellion in the Philippines.
She is also the president of the Southeast Asia Ministers of Education Organization.
The OVP said that “comparisons between Duterte and the security personnel of former vice presidents are absurd and completely lacking basis.”
