MANILA, 24 July 2005 — While charges of dishonesty hang like a Damocles sword over the Philippine presidency, ordinary Filipinos have been found out to be mostly honest.

In a unique way of finding out how honest Filipinos are, Imbestigador, a Channel 7 weekly television program, discreetly shot footage of how ordinary people reacted when they found lost wallets.

The test was conducted in the streets of Metro Manila and its outskirts recently.

Of 80 wallets used in the test, 65 were returned to the Channel 7 agent who posed as owner of the lost wallet, with money and papers intact. Each wallet had two 100-peso bills, a contact number and a planted letter of purportedly of a mother telling her child to make do with the meager allowance for the week.

“I am sorry but this is only what I could give you for your week’s allowance),” said the worried mother in her letter.

People from all walks of life — students, housewives, office employee, drivers, construction workers, jobless slum dwellers, and vendors — made it to the split-second fame on television as they sent SMS or text messages to the owner of the lost wallet. Some were seen giving chase to the woman agent whom they thought dropped the wallet accidentally.

Without any suspicion that it was only a bait, two high school girls of Ramon Magsaysay High School picked up the wallet and sent a text message to the cell phone number in the wallet a few minutes after finding it.

They waited for its owner in a store across the school and readily returned the wallet.

A driver who lives in nearby Bulacan read the letter and took pity over the owner that when he returned the wallet, he said he would have wanted to add a few pesos if he only he had the money.

Following the trail of some of the 15 people who did not return the wallets, Imbestigador anchor Mike Enriquez had traced one old woman who immediately went to a store to buy some rice. A man and a teenager on the street who were strangers to each other divided the 200 pesos equally.

Professor Louella Bara of the University of the Philippines’ Sociology Department said it is hard to measure honesty.

But 65 out of 80 people returning the wallets is a sure display that even those who do not have much materially are not lacking in that virtue.

“The 15 people who failed to return the wallets may not have cell phones or could have already traveled far that returning the wallet may mean spending more than 200 pesos from their own pockets,” the professor surmised.

Imbestigador’s anchor said he and his staff were happy with their findings.

Enriquez said he thought of testing the ordinary folks amid the growing perception that the virtue of honesty had long been lost among Filipinos, with the Philippines repeatedly at the top of the list of countries where corruption is prevalent.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is facing her worst crisis since coming to power in 2001 over allegations that she cheated her way back into office in presidential elections last year. Arroyo’s husband, son and brother-in-law have also been accused of receiving protection money from illegal gambling operators.

President Arroyo initially refused to answer the cheating allegations and even tried to cover it up despite the release of tapes of her wiretapped conversations with an election commissioner, during which they were discussing ways of making her lead by more than one million votes over her closest rival, Fernando Poe Jr.

Amid threats of resignation by some of her Cabinet members, Arroyo publicly admitted having talked with the official and apologized for the “lapse of judgment.”

However, she has vowed to cling on to power despite calls by many of the nation’s respected former leaders, including former President Corazon Aquino, for her to resign. Arroyo has vowed to fight impeachment charges being prepared by the opposition.