The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) is set to file criminal and administrative charges against several DAR-Cebu officials and personnel in connection with the discovery of two sacks of undistributed certificates of land ownership awards (CLOAs).
DAR Secretary John R. Castriciones said the concerned officials are liable for failing to distribute a total of 2,007 CLOAs to agrarian reform beneficiaries (ARBs).
“Some of the CLOAs date back to 1990s. Some are CLOAs that date back to 1987,” Castriciones revealed.
Holding the CLOAs without justifiable reasons, he said, means the officials and personnel involved will be charged with appropriate charges.
Initially, 13 officials are facing criminal and administrative charges, but Castriciones has declined to name the officials and personnel involved pending the result of the initial investigation. Failure to distribute the CLOAs constitutes violations of several laws, including the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law (CARL) and Republic Act 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act for dereliction of duty.
Castriciones has been “hands on” in implementing the CARP and regularly visits far-flung areas to conduct what he describes as “Dar-to-Door” CLOA distribution.
The DAR’s renewed vigor and intensified distribution of CLOAs is in response to President Duterte’s marching orders, Castriciones said.
According to the DAR chief, the two sacks of CLOAs are neatly stock-filed inside the Land Tenure Services office at the DAR Provincial Building.
Immediately after the discovery of the undistributed CLOAs, Castriciones said, he immediately ordered the creation of the Task Force Undistributed Cebu CLOA to conduct a deeper investigation and shed light on the issue of the CLOAs.
Immediately after the discovery, Castriciones said he also directed his officials to conduct a ground validation on the landholdings and ARBs to know the real and actual status of the land and the ARBs in Cebu.
“We found out that these CLOAs have been in storage for several years, depriving the ARBs of their opportunity to own a piece of land as mandated by the law,” Castriciones said.
“The DAR provincial office in Cebu has no right to withhold the distribution of titles the moment that it is released to the DAR by the Registry of Deeds, which means that it is all set and ready for distribution to ARBs anytime,” he said.
Castriciones said the CLOAs were discovered to have been stored inside the office of the Land Transfer and Implementation Division (LTID) in DAR provincial office in Cebu.
The stored CLOAs consisted of 387 emancipation patents (EPs) and 1,620 CLOAs totaling 2,007 land titles.
All in all, the team had itemized the said EPs/CLOAs ranging from the years 1987 up to the 2020s.
In addition to this, there is another batch of 3,391 undistributed land titles, covering an area of 2,526 hectares, which the Land Bank of the Philippines (LandBank) turned over to the DAR.
During the inventory, the DAR team also found another 306 collective CLOAs inside four boxes. Some LTID staff claimed that the collective CLOAs are still subject for verification and validation process by from municipal agrarian reform program officers (MARPOs).
As this developed, Castriciones ordered the immediate distribution of a total of 422 individual EPs/CLOAs to 422 ARBs comprising of 315.2704 hectares of land. He said that the 3,391 titles turned over by the LandBank, should also be included in the distribution process.
Castriciones also directed all the DAR regional directors to submit an inventory of undistributed EPs/CLOAs in their respective region for transparency.
During field investigation on April 21 to 23, the Task Force together with officials from the Bureau of Land Tenure and Improvement (BLTI) of the DAR, met in Cebu City and conducted an initial validation to determine the physical and actual authenticity of the titles.
The DAR Field Operations Office and the Bureau of Land Tenure Improvement said the CLOAs were found to be “authentic in nature” based on the security features on the titles and the corresponding serial numbers “as reflected in the record book.”
“The initial validation also helped in knowing the year of registration and the municipalities from where it was documented and generated,” said Undersecretary Elmer Distor, who chairs the task force.
Distor said that out of the 2,007 CLOAS, there are 1,585 titles that are still subject for validation due to reasons like retention cases, double titling, actual occupancy by farmers, overlapping of boundaries, conflict of ownership and other anomalies.
The second phase of the validation will include reports and recommendations from DAR municipal agrarian reform officers on the circumstance of the 2,007 stored CLOAs; survey of the landholdings; and strategic plans from the DAR provincial and municipal offices to hasten the process flow obtaining CLOAs.