Senate electoral tribunal gets P87-M budget this year

MANILA, Philippines - A “jobless” Senate Electoral Tribunal (SET) is getting a budget of P87.1 million for this year.

There is no case pending with the tribunal, since there was no election protest filed against any senator elected in the combined congressional-local elections in May last year.

This means that it has no protest to resolve until 2016, when a new batch of 12 senators is elected.

The SET has no performance target reflected in the 2014 budget as proposed by President Aquino. Setting performance goals is a new innovation introduced by the Department of Budget and Management starting with this year’s outlay.

The P87.1-million SET budget is for the salaries and other benefits of the tribunal’s 116 officials and employees, and for the allowances of its nine members led by senior Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio.

Two other justices – Teresita Leonardo de Castro and Arturo Brion – and six senators sit in the Senate electoral court.

Members of the Senate and House electoral tribunals are prohibited from receiving salaries, since they get their pay from the Supreme Court (SC) and Congress. The Constitution bans double compensation.

Tribunal members, however, receive allowances, which amount to at least P100,000 a month per member.

During the impeachment trial of former chief justice Renato Corona, the Senate impeachment court was informed that he earned more than P1 million in several months that he sat in the House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal (HRET).

The present HRET chairman is Justice Presbitero Velasco. Two other justices and six House members sit in the tribunal.

Apparently due to criticism that the Senate tribunal has no case to resolve, Congress, largely upon the initiative of the Senate, has reduced the SET budget for 2014 from P126.7 million, as proposed by President Aquino and adopted by the House, to P87.1 million, or a decrease of P39.6 million.

The HRET, on the other hand, has funding for this year amounting to P148 million.

In contrast, the House tribunal has more than 30 electoral cases to resolve. It is not clear what the status of the protests is, since the HRET is secretive about pending cases. Members are tightlipped on what is going on in the tribunal.

The Senate and the House have increased their respective budgets for this year by P346 million and P377 million, respectively.