Vice President Sara Duterte said she will not give any explanation about the suspicious identities of the Office of the Vice President (OVP)'s confidential funds' recipients.

Despite repeated attempts by the media to seek for Duterte's explanation about the suspicious names, including Mary Grace Piattos, the Vice President said she "cannot explain because it will entail explaining intelligence operations."

"There is a law that prohibits officials who gathered information because of their office to divulge it in public. It's the anti-graft and corrupt practices act. There is a specific provision of law you cannot divulge confidential information that you receive while in office," she added in a press conference on Wednesday, Dec. 11.

Lawmakers leading the House probe into the use of confidential funds of the OVP, as well as of the Department of Education (DepEd) which Duterte previously led, flagged the discrepancies in the receipts submitted by her office to the Commission on Audit (COA).

They found the names of more than a thousand recipients suspicious and confirmed, through the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), that hundreds of them have no civil registry record.

Meanwhile, the Vice President said that she also cannot be sure if the acknowledgment receipts (ARs) being cited in the House hearing are true or not because there is already a chain in the handling of evidence.

She also distanced herself from what could be possibly fictitious identities of the recipients as she was not the one making it.

"With regard to ARs, I had nothing to do with the preparation of ARs. It went down to the grassroots level. So I had nothing to do with preparations of ARs," she said.

"I was up here in the structure, and money went down for information," she added.

Duterte also defended the OVP's, as well as of DepEd's, need for confidential funds because they are needed to target insurgency that is related to poverty alleviation.

"The position of the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education is that national security is a holistic concept," she said.

Despite the existence of some relevant agencies, such as of National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC), which the OVP can tap for its program, Duterte said the OVP needs to implement it on its own because the office "works faster."

"We work far faster if we are allowed to purchase information and target our projects immediately on this certain school or certain barangay or certain municipality.  We move faster if we can target our projects," she said.