Recto bats for feedback mechanism from Palace

MANILA, Philippines - The Aquino administration should be transparent in how it used last year’s budget, which reached more than P1 trillion, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto said over the weekend.

He said he has not seen any document showing whether itemized projects in the previous year’s budget have materialized.

“The problem is… what should have been a seamless progression of the budgeting process is interrupted in the accountability phase because there is no feedback as to the status of the projects, programs and activities sought to be funded,” he added.

Recto admitted that it is hard for Congress or its constituents to check if a specific project authorized in the General Appropriations Act (GAA) has really been implemented or realigned or if its funds were impounded.

The reason for this is that the familiar budgeting format used during “budget authorization” and “budget execution” ceased to be used during the “budget accountability” phase, Recto explained.     

Recto said the Department of Budget and Management, whose recent reforms allow it to keep tabs on each project, can render the itemized report.

The senator came up with the proposal as he noticed that the executive branch had no way of reporting back to Congress the status of projects outlined in the previous fiscal year or if these were fully implemented.

“We are in receipt of documents more than one foot thick, almost 11 kilos in weight, containing 5,020 pages of fine print, but you can go through all of them line by line and you won’t find anything which says that the projects lovingly enumerated in the previous year’s budget have been implemented,” Recto said.   

“If you were able to carefully itemize the projects when you were asking for money, then what prevents you now that you have come back to ask for more from giving us an itemized report of how the money was spent?” he asked.

He recommended that Congress should be furnished a “new budget accountability form” to prove if a project, activity or program authorized in the GAA had indeed been implemented.

The senator also proposed the use of the same GAA format in reporting that the projects funded for the year have been implemented.

“We want receipts for the funds spent,” Recto said in Filipino.

 “The idea is for the executive to return to us the same GAA but this time it will be in annotated form. Every funding item in the GAA of the previous year will carry a corresponding note indicating when it was completed and the amount spent for its completion.