Forensic accounting is where spreadsheets lose their innocence, receipts acquire personalities, and money is asked to explain where it has been hiding.
That made Alexander Cabrera’s testimony in Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial particularly intriguing. A certified public accountant and lawyer, Cabrera is chairman emeritus of Isla Lipana & Co., the Philippine member firm affiliated with PricewaterhouseCoopers. His specialty, in essence, is following the money after everyone else has finished explaining it.
Cabrera is something of a financial tailor, stitching together fragments of records, transactions, receipts, and bank movements until they form a tapestry of where the money came from and where it went.
And the numbers he presented were anything but soothing.
Take GenCorp, which Duterte declared among her assets. Cabrera said its apparent value was difficult to reconcile with the business attached to it. GenCorp was identified as the franchise holder of five Jollibee outlets. At a conservative P35 million per franchise, that is P175 million before the calculator even warms up.
Then came the receipts. Documents from the five outlets bore GenCorp’s name as franchise holder. In forensic accounting, paperwork has an irritating habit of remembering what narratives conveniently forget.
Cabrera also examined the curious migration of money into manager’s checks. Unlike time deposits, manager’s checks earn no interest. Yet roughly P41 million and P55 million were repeatedly moved into such instruments over several years, with the checks remaining outstanding beyond the year-end dates used for SALN reporting.
Call it financial limbo. The money had not necessarily disappeared. It had simply moved somewhere the year-end balance could not see it.
Another transaction involved roughly P11 million paid in favor of a Davao dentist described as a Duterte friend and business partner. Cabrera’s dry observation was that, whatever the payment was for, it was unlikely to be for “pasta” or a dental filling.
Then came the percentages.
Cabrera said Cale88 showed a 51-percent underdeclaration, along with more than P222 million in foreign remittances, over P193 million of which came from China, with which the Philippines has a territorial dispute. Metro City Chow, where Duterte reportedly held 20 percent and her husband, Manases Carpio, 47 percent, allegedly showed a 69-percent underdeclaration.
Philippine tax law treats an underdeclaration exceeding 30 percent of taxable sales, receipts, or income as prima facie evidence of a false or fraudulent tax return.
For GenCorp, Cabrera put the alleged 2022-2025 underdeclaration at roughly P1.1 billion. Across the four years examined, he placed Duterte’s undeclared wealth at P817.9 million.
Those are allegations, not verdicts. The defense can challenge the records, assumptions, methodology, and conclusions.
But forensic accounting has one inconvenient quality for anyone defending unexplained wealth. It is gloriously indifferent to political storytelling. And Cabrera made that abundantly clear, saying he agreed to work with the prosecution on two conditions: it would be pro bono, and the numbers, not the politics, would determine his conclusions.
It does not ask whether an explanation sounds convincing.
It asks whether the numbers add up.
And numbers, unlike politicians, are notoriously bad at changing their stories.
