FOR the second straight year, the number of fact-finding case workloads of the Office of the Ombudsman continued to drop with the yearend 2024 count settling at 1,632.
This was 34.72 percent lower than the 2023 total of 2,500 cases and 49.25 percent down from 3,216 cases filed in 2022.
Likewise showing declines for the second year in a row were the number of completed investigations and the tally of criminal or administrative cases resulting from such investigations.
From 1,617 completed investigations two years ago, the total fell to 1,185 in 2023 and even lower to 795 as of December 2024.
The number of criminal indictments and administrative charges against erring officials also went south from 325 cases in 2022 and 226 in 2023 to just 171 as of last year. This means that between 2023 and 2024, the Ombudsman’s output of cases dropped by 24.34 percent.
Compared to the total from 2022, the Ombudsman’s output showed a 47.38 percent decrease.
The data were released in the Quarterly Physical Report of Operation (QPRO) as of December 31, 2024 posted on the agency’s official website as a transparency requirement.
On the other hand, the Ombudsman registered a big improvement in case survival with 212 out of 230 cases being sustained by the courts despite being challenged on sufficiency of evidence for a 92.17 percent rating.
This compares favorably against 45.05 percent case survival rating in 2022 and 40.95 percent in 2023.
However, the conviction rate also dipped year on year from 73.4 percent in 2023 (1,242 convictions in 1,692 decided cases) to 55.76 percent last year (271 convictions in 486 decided cases).
