The Presidential Legislative Liaison Office (PLLO) defended on Tuesday hiring several consultants in 2017 after the Commission on Audit expressed alarm.

In a statement, PLLO, headed by Secretary Adelino Sitoy, said it was in transition last year and "some much-needed policy reforms in organization and operations had to be made."

This is to "adequately and aggressively respond" to President Rodrigo Duterte’s priority legislative agenda and to his strong advocacy toward federalism, it said.

"Its present technical and administrative manpower notwithstanding, the engagement of professionals and human resource of varied capacities and skills sets dedicated to specialized policy studies and technical assistance work, where trust and confidence are of the utmost consideration as well, was deemed necessary," PLLO explained.

It also said increased number of coordinative activities entailed the proportional increase in the volume of paper work and administrative duties.

"Given this backdrop, the PLLO was constrained to hire additional manpower with qualifications commensurate to their respective tasks to supplement the human resource requirement of the PLLO on endeavours beyond the optimum in-house capacity of its existing staff ? from legal professionals to members of the academe and to skilled personnel, all with proven capacities in public administration, local government, administrative law, media relations and good governance," it added.

COA, in its annual audit report last year, said PLLO, as well as the Governance Commission for Government-Owned and Controlled Corporations, has said these two agencies both under the Office of the President hired consultants whose jobs were redundant and doable by existing regular personnel.

PLLO said it had submitted its comments on the preliminary audit by COA and had resolved the issue during the exit conference by management officials of the two agencies. Celerina Monte/DMS