Chiz defends pro-Abad senators

MANILA, Philippines - Sen. Francis Escudero yesterday clarified criticisms over the apparent bias shown by administration allies toward Budget Secretary Florencio Abad during the Senate public hearing on the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) that the Supreme Court had declared unconstitutional.

“We cannot dictate to our colleagues on what they can and cannot ask during the hearing (Thursday) or if they will side (with the resource persons) or if they will shout at them,” Escudero said.

Escudero, chairman of the Senate finance committee that held the hearing, said they could not limit and control the questioning.

“What is important is that they were given a chance to answer and the public were able to listen to their explanation,” Escudero said.

With the recent developments, Escudero reiterated that Abad and the other Cabinet secretaries would still need to explain further their request for budget approval once Congress starts to deliberate the 2015 proposed national budget.

As this developed, Senators Nancy Binay and Grace Poe said that somebody should be held accountable for DAP.

Binay also wants Abad to account for the P90 billion in government savings, which were not part of the DAP allocations.

“Dapat mayroong managot (somebody should be held liable). Remember that this is the people’s money that we are talking about and there is still P90 billion missing in the government’s ‘savings’. Secretary Abad owes the Filipino people an explanation on where these funds went,” Binay said.

Poe shared Binay’s call that the use of savings, apart from DAP, should be made public by the administration.

It was Binay who pointed out in last Thursday’s hearing that some appropriations did not fall under the Department of Budget and Management’s list of projects funded by the controversial program. The DBM listed 116 projects funded by the DAP.

Based on records, DBM gave the Commission on Elections (Comelec) an additional funding worth P4.1 billion intended to be used to purchase precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines for the 2013 midterm polls. The request for additional funding was made after its proposed P17 billion budget was cut down to P7 billion.

Commission on Audit (COA) chief Grace Pulido-Tan had admitted that the commission received a P5-million budget for purchase of vehicle, supposedly taken from the P143-million funding for the agency’s information technology infrastructure program and the hiring of litigation experts.

This was when she was confronted by Sen. Jinggoy Estrada during budget deliberations of the agency last year.

During the latest hearing, Binay then asked Abad why COA’s vehicle request was not in the list of DAP-funded projects.

Binay said she was surprised to learn from Abad that the P4.1 billion given to Comelec did not come from DAP and it appeared that aside from the list of projects whose funds came from the DAP, there is another savings mechanism where funds for other government projects are sourced. – With Sheila Crisostomo, Aurea Calica