Bicol Region · original research
Every transparency page in the country links you to DILG and stops. This one checked the websites. Nine local governments scored against twelve mandated disclosures, five more that could not be scored, and the reasons why are worse than the scores. One of the rows is a correction to our own earlier mistake.
Checked 17 August 2026. Each site’s homepage was fetched and searched for a link to each disclosure. Websites change; if a row is wrong today, tell us and we will recheck it.
The scorecard
A filled square means the disclosure is linked from the front page. This measures findability, not legal compliance. A government that publishes its budget without linking it scores zero here, and to a resident looking for it, that is nearly the same thing.
| Government | Transparency Seal | Full Disclosure Policy | Annual budget | Bids and procurement | Bids and Awards Committee | Annual Procurement Plan | Citizens Charter | Ordinances | Executive orders | SALN | COA audit reports | Elected officials | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Naga CityIndependent city · last updated 16 August 2026 | 7/12 | ||||||||||||
| MilagrosMunicipality, Masbate · last updated 14 August 2026 | 7/12 | ||||||||||||
| Sorsogon CityComponent city, Sorsogon · last updated 28 July 2026 | 6/12 | ||||||||||||
| MasbateProvince · last updated 15 November 2025 | 5/12 | ||||||||||||
| Camarines NorteProvince · last updated 1 June 2026 | 5/12 | ||||||||||||
| Camarines SurProvince · last updated 12 August 2026 | 4/12 | ||||||||||||
| Legazpi CityComponent city, Albay · last updated July 2026 | 1/12 | ||||||||||||
| AlbayProvince · last updated 18 January 2023 | 0/12 | ||||||||||||
| CatanduanesProvince · last updated 13 December 2018 | 0/12 |
Naga City. The best LGU site in Bicol and it is not close. Runs a separate People’s Budget Portal. Content sits on the www2 subdomain while naga.gov.ph is the canonical reference, which splits citations and search authority between two hostnames.
Milagros. A municipality on a proper gov.ph domain, updated this month, that beats every province in the region and its own provincial capital. Masbate City has a site; it blocks automated access, so we could not score it.
Sorsogon City. The third best disclosure record in the region, and almost nobody can find it. The site publishes a Full Disclosure Policy section, a BAC bulletin board, an Annual Procurement Plan, a Citizens Charter and executive orders. It also serves “noindex, nofollow” to search engines, which instructs Google not to list any of it. A city that does the work and then tells the search engines to ignore it gets no credit from the residents it was for.
Masbate. Hosted on a web vendor’s subdomain rather than a government domain. No masbate.gov.ph exists. A provincial government reachable only through a supplier’s hostname has no control over its own address.
Camarines Norte. The strongest procurement disclosure of any province here: Invitation to Bid, Notice of Award and an Annual Procurement Plan, all linked from the front page. Runs on a .com rather than a government domain.
Camarines Sur. Current, on a proper gov.ph domain, with a working bidding and procurement list. No budget documents or issuances reachable from the homepage.
Legazpi City. The regional centre of Bicol. Current and well maintained as a news site. The Transparency Seal link exists; nothing else on this list is reachable from the front page, including the list of city officials.
Albay. Nothing on this list is linked from the homepage. The most recent item of any kind is from January 2023, which makes this the province of 1.38 million people whose website has not been updated in over three years.
Catanduanes. Nothing on this list is linked. Last visible content is from December 2018. A second site at provinceofcatanduanes.gov.ph looks newer but returns HTTP 403 to automated requests, so we could not check it.
Could not be scored
These are not blanks in the table. Each one failed in a specific way that is worth reading, because the failure is the finding.
Returns HTTP 403 to automated requests. The site is live in a browser. Blocking automated access also blocks the tools that would index its disclosures.
https://ligaocity.albay.gov.ph/
Returns HTTP 403 to automated requests. Hosted under the albay.gov.ph domain rather than its own.
No working TLS. Requesting the https:// address returns a 302 redirect back to http://, so the connection cannot be secured. Also on a .com.ph rather than a government domain.
Serves the text “Javascript is required. Please enable javascript before you are allowed to see this page” in place of content. Search engines, screen readers and anyone on a slow connection get nothing.
Returns HTTP 403 to automated requests, the third Bicol city to do so. Corrected on 17 August 2026: we first recorded this city as having no website at all, because a search for it returned nothing official. The site exists. Our search method was the problem, and the correction is logged here rather than quietly applied.
Requesting https://fdpp.dilg.gov.ph/ returns a 302 redirect to the http:// address. The national portal that holds every LGU’s mandated financial postings has no working TLS. We are not reporting this to embarrass anyone. We are reporting it because a citizen on a public network cannot safely read their own government’s financial disclosures, and that is a fixable thing that stays broken while nobody writes it down. The Full Disclosure Policy page covers what the portal is supposed to hold.
The rest of this section
What a Bicol LGU budget is made of, and the figures we have not collected yet.
How LGU buying works, from the procurement plan to the notice of award.
Who sits on a BAC, what they decide, and why the composition matters.
The eleven documents every LGU must post, and where they are supposed to go.
COA annual audit reports and the statements officials are required to file.
Every source this site uses, what we have pulled, and what we have not.