MANILA, 21 July 2005 — Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) chief Rosalinda Baldoz has asked anti-illegal recruitment czar Reynaldo Jaylo to name the officials who he said were coddling bigtime offenders.

Baldoz said it was unfair to keep people guessing who the corrupt officials are because there are many who are doing their best in the campaign against illegal recruiters. “He was being unfair to the entire POEA by lumping all personnel together and calling it a human trafficking syndicate,” Baldoz said.

Jaylo, who heads the Presidential Anti-Illegal Recruitment Task Force (PAIRTF), complained that certain personnel in the POEA and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) were conniving with groups accused of violating the illegal recruitment law.

He said it was frustrating that the PAIRTF files large-scale estafa (fraud) and illegal recruitment cases, which are non-bailable offenses, only to find the offenders released on bail “because they were able to produce certifications from the POEA that the cases they are being charged with are covered by job orders.”

Baldoz agreed that this was possible but she was sure not all POEA personnel are corrupt.

Even then, Baldoz said she would endorse the continued existence of the task force since it has proven itself to be useful.

She said illegal recruitment complaints received by the POEA have gone down by more than 50 percent since the task force was created.

Thousands of cases of illegal job recruitments remain unresolved in regular and labor courts in the Philippines, which has an overseas work force of about seven million, one of the world’s biggest.

The task force’s performance will be under review by an oversight committee of Department of Labor and Employment as the executive order creating it mandated only one year, or until July 9.

Baldoz said the task force was effective because “they have more capability to do intensive investigations into illegal recruitment complaints.”

“They have police power — arresting power. And we do not have that,” she said.