House budget hearing starts tomorrow

MANILA, Philippines — Budget hearings in the appropriations committee of the House of Representatives will start tomorrow, three days after the Department of Budget and Management submitted to Congress the P5.024-trillion national budget for 2022.

Panel chairman Rep. Eric Go Yap of party-list ACT-CIS told reporters the chamber, under the leadership of Speaker Lord Allan Velasco, is planning to have the General Appropriations Bill (GAB) approved by the end of September.

“The instruction from Speaker is to make sure that we fix the budget, scrutinize it well and pass it on time. We want to give a copy of the GAB to the Senate a week before the start of the sessions in November, so that they can start before the sessions,” he said.

Yap said they would prefer that President Duterte certify the 2022 budget bill as urgent.

The September deadline to have the budget measure passed is in light of the scheduled deadline set by the Commission on Elections by Oct. 1, which is the start of the filing of certificates of candidacy for both the national and local elections in May 2022.

“This officially signals the start of the budget season in Congress or the legislative process of evaluation, debate and amendment which we hope could lead to the timely and decisive passage of the 2022 General Appropriations Act,” Velasco said.

In an interview with reporters via Zoom, Yap revealed that the House leadership will officially make the request for Palace certification tomorrow.

“We will have a meeting with the Executive Secretary (Salvador Medialdea) and the Speaker to justify why there is a need to certify the bill as urgent,” he said.

“If you would take a look at it, we only have a short time to deliberate the biggest budget in the country’s history. We only have a few days to deliberate and hear out our colleagues in Congress, that’s why we really need to certify this budget as urgent,” Yap explained.

The certification of urgency on the budget bill from the President would allow the House to pass the measure on second and third readings on the same day and do away with the rule requiring a three-day interval between the two votings.

This was also the case during deliberations on the 2021 national budget last year when Duterte certified the 2021 GAB as urgent, which allowed the chamber to pass it in a special session following weeks of delay due to the speakership squabble between Velasco and Rep. Alan Peter Cayetano.

Apart from support from the Palace, Yap said they are also asking for cooperation of fellow congressmen to expedite the budget hearings and deliberations.

He said lawmakers who have parochial concerns on the budget of their districts could just raise them to the vice chairs of the panel and they would be addressed outside of committee or plenary hearings.

Yap earlier said they had already met with department and agency heads in the executive branch for advance discussions on the 2022 budget.

The chamber only has less than five weeks to complete the deliberations and pass the budget measure.

Yap’s panel has set 15 days of hearings from Aug. 26 until Sept. 16, or eight working days for plenary debate and deliberations.

“Our target is to finish it by Sept. 30, second and final reading, because you will have a session break by Oct. 1 and our session will resume in November. So we should have given a copy of the GAB to the Senate a week before the start of the November session so that they can start reviewing before we are in session,” he pointed out. – Edu Punay, Mayen Jaymalin