[Op-Ed] Ann Cuisia: Who Is Afraid of the CADENA Act?

Eight months after the Senate acted, the bill that would let Filipinos follow their own money is still waiting in the House

By Ann Cuisia (originally published on the author’s website)

Commentary | Status updated September 1, 2026

On September 23, 2025, I published an article titled “Why ‘Blockchaining the Budget’ Misses the Point.” It went viral enough to raise eyebrows across the technology community—especially among blockchain enthusiasts.

Some called me anti-blockchain. Others called me anti-technology.

That was amusing. I have advocated blockchain in the Philippines since 2017. My objection was never to the technology. It was to the idea that Congress should write a specific tool into law as though technology never changes.

A real technologist knows that tools evolve. A responsible lawmaker must legislate principles that endure.

Government should mandate traceability, integrity, public access, accountability and verifiability. It should not lock the country into one platform, one architecture or—worse—one future vendor. Blockchain may be an excellent tool for the job. It should earn its place on technical merit, not enjoy permanent protection through legislation.

That was the point many of my bashers missed. Technology was not being rejected. It was being protected from bad policymaking.

Nearly a year later, the argument is no longer academic. The original “Blockchain the Budget” proposal evolved into Senate Bill No. 1506, the Citizen Access and Disclosure of Expenditures for National Accountability Act—the CADENA Act.

The Senate approved it 17–0 on December 15, 2025. Yet as of today, the measure remains unfinished in the House of Representatives.

The uncomfortable question is no longer whether blockchain belongs in the law.

The question is: Who is afraid of a law that lets the public follow the money?

A bill—or a terms of reference?

The first Senate public hearing on the original Senate Bill No. 1330 was held on October 2, 2025. Despite being a known blockchain proponent and one of the few industry voices publicly questioning the bill’s design, I was not invited.

I joined the process later. At the Technical Working Group meeting on October 23, I asked what I believed was the most difficult—and most necessary—question in the room:

Are we reviewing a bill or a terms of reference?

The draft looked less like a law establishing public rights and government duties and more like a technical specification for acquiring a particular kind of system. A law should say what the government must accomplish and what citizens are entitled to see. A terms of reference tells a supplier what to build.

Confusing the two could have created vendor bias, unnecessary cost and a law that would become obsolete as technology changed.

Between October 23 and the next public hearing on November 4, representatives and contributors from more than 50 organizations—technologists, lawyers, academics, professionals, civic groups and ordinary patriots—reviewed and proposed language through a shared Google document. It was legislation being stress-tested in public: line by line, definition by definition, safeguard by safeguard.

By November 4, the proposal had a new name and a stronger spine. It was already the CADENA Act. To Senator Bam Aquino’s credit, he did not blink when the harder technical questions were raised. While a few participants still pushed for technology-specific wording, he allowed the bill to move toward a principle-based, technology-neutral framework. Roughly 90 percent of the substance of our submitted Version 2 was reflected in the working measure.

That is what genuine consultation can do. It does not weaken a bill. It prevents a good intention from becoming a bad system.

What changed—and why ordinary Filipinos should care

The revisions were technical on paper, but their effect is simple: CADENA was redesigned so citizens can trace money, identify responsibility and compare promises with results.

First, the law would not depend on a single technology. Blockchain, distributed ledgers and other secure data-integrity systems may be used, but only if they meet the standards of the law. The technology can change; the public’s right to reliable information cannot.

Second, CADENA would go beyond dumping scanned PDFs on a government website. Budget information must be searchable, structured, downloadable and reusable. Public dashboards and open application programming interfaces would allow journalists, universities, watchdogs and even citizen-built applications to analyze the same records.

In plain language: the government cannot claim “transparency” by burying the public in thousands of unreadable files.

Third, records across the entire budget chain must be linked and reconcilable—from authorization and appropriation to procurement, contractor, disbursement and the result delivered. Every important record would carry timestamps, metadata and non-repudiable digital signatures.

That means citizens should be able to ask: Who proposed this project? Who approved it? Who won the contract? What was the unit price? When was payment released? Was the project completed? Did it produce the promised result?

Fourth, independent mirror sites may be operated by qualified institutions in government, civil society, the private sector and academe. No single office should be able to quietly alter history or make inconvenient records disappear. Fiscal data is expressly treated as property of the Filipino people, held only in trust by the State.

Fifth, the revised framework added citizen feedback, anomaly reporting and outcome-based dashboards. Spending ₱1 billion is not, by itself, an achievement. The public must be able to see what that ₱1 billion actually built, whom it served and whether it worked.

The bill also provides phased implementation, integration with existing government financial and procurement systems, independent oversight, public participation and penalties for deliberate concealment or false disclosure.

CADENA will not magically end corruption. No technology can make false data truthful at the moment a dishonest person enters it. But the law can create attribution, preserve evidence, expose inconsistencies and make collusion harder to hide.

Investigations usually begin after the money is gone. CADENA is meant to leave a trail while the money is moving.

The Senate moved. Then came the silence.

After the committee work, the Senate moved unusually fast. The measure was sponsored in plenary in November, approved on second reading on December 10 and passed on third and final reading five days later, 17–0.

During the final stretch, I was the only private citizen invited to remain available to assist in case technical questions arose. For once, a citizen did not merely comment after a law was written. We were allowed to help make the law better before it was passed.

Then the bill reached the House.

The House Committee on Information and Communications Technology held its first discussion on May 6, 2026, where I was again invited. The House Committee on Science and Technology later approved the measure. It now awaits action by the Committee on Appropriations.

On July 10, our group sent a formal follow-up inquiry to the committee chaired by Rep. Mikaela Suansing. As of September 1, we have received no reply. September 10 will mark two months of silence.

More troubling, the CADENA Act—previously identified as a priority measure—was left out of the government’s shortened list of priority bills for the next 12 months. On August 27, Senator Aquino publicly questioned that omission. The measure remains on the longer Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council list, but being “still on a list” is not the same as being passed.

Delay alone is not proof of bad faith. Committees have workloads, procedures and fiscal questions to resolve. But when a bill’s very purpose is to expose insertions, contractors, prices, approvals and disbursements, citizens are entitled to ask whether the delay is merely procedural—or uncomfortably political.

Our money, not theirs

The Philippines needs the CADENA Act today more than ever because we keep responding to corruption after the damage is done.

We investigate after the flood. We audit after the bridge fails. We search for documents after billions have been released. We summon officials after contractors have been paid. We promise prosecution after public anger becomes impossible to ignore.

That is accountability by autopsy.

CADENA offers something more useful: accountability by design.

It would not replace the Commission on Audit, the Ombudsman, Congress, journalists or the courts. It would give all of them—and every Filipino—better evidence, earlier. It would turn disconnected records into a visible chain of responsibility.

This is why the bill matters beyond blockchain, beyond technology and beyond one administration. A government that spends trillions should not ask its citizens to survive on press releases, scattered PDFs and promises of future investigations.

The national budget is not the private wallet of Congress. Public officials are managers of our money, not its owners.

So why has a bill unanimously approved by the Senate remained unfinished for eight months? Why has a formal citizen inquiry gone unanswered? Why was a near-finished transparency measure dropped from the shortened priority list just as the country again confronts flooding and questions over public works spending?

Perhaps there are innocent explanations. Then the House should publish them.

Call the hearing. Release the committee timetable. State the fiscal concerns. Invite the experts back. Put every proposed amendment on the record. Transparency should begin with the transparency bill itself.

And if citizens must go to the Ombudsman merely to obtain a reply about a measure designed to protect public money, then Congress will have proved the point of the CADENA Act more powerfully than any advocate ever could.

The money belongs to the Filipino people. The records should belong to us, too.

Pass the CADENA Act. Let the public follow the money—before our money becomes their money.

This article is published on BitPinas: [Op-Ed] Ann Cuisia: Who Is Afraid of the CADENA Act?

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