P323 B in 2014 budget realigned – lawmaker

MANILA, Philippines - The Aquino administration has realigned a total of P323.6 billion out of the P2.26-trillion national budget in 2014, Kabataan party-list Rep. Terry Ridon disclosed yesterday.

Ridon, citing data from the 2016 National Expenditure Program (NEP), pointed to page 951 showing that the Aquino administration pooled P90.4 billion from various departments and agencies and P233.2 billion from the Special Purpose Funds and subsequently transferred said funds to several agencies and other SPFs.

The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) submitted the proposed P3-trillion national budget for 2016 on Tuesday, and subsequently made it available online.

Budgetary transfers refer to the movement of resources either within an agency or from one fund or agency to another.

“A specter is haunting the national budget, the specter of the Disbursement Acceleration Program. Even if the government supposedly discontinued DAP in 2013, the President and the executive department were still able to tinker with hundreds of billions of public funds, transferring them from the original object of expenditure in the Congress-approved budget to another,” Ridon said.

He said the realignments were a usurpation of the congressional power of the purse.

While the NEP does not reveal details on the realignment of funds, a document uploaded in the DBM website does.

Ridon said certain budgetary transfers are suspicious, such as the transfer of P9.6 billion from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Public Works and Highways for the construction of “farm-to-market roads” and the transfer of P1.1 billion to the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao from the budget of various government agencies.

Funds from several SPFs were also transferred to other similar items, including a P2.6-billion transfer from the Miscellaneous Personnel Benefits Fund to the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Fund, he said.

“On paper, the transfers seem to be innocuous and ordinary. But what we want to point out is that the President and the executive agencies under him are realigning billions of public funds with little to no public scrutiny. Maximum discretion is at play, reducing the congressional approval of the budget to nothing but a mere ceremonial gesture,” Ridon said.

Ridon stressed the P323.6 billion realigned by the Aquino administration is over 14 times bigger than the P22.5-billion supplemental budget for 2014 approved by Congress.

“What’s the use of having a line-item budget when the executive department can just tinker with the funds at will after enactment? Such fund transfers are highly vulnerable to corruption. The vestiges of the pork barrel system may even be hiding between those lines of budget transfers,” Ridon said.

Other documents obtained from DBM showed budget transfers in the 2015 budget are also prevalent, he said.

Just days after President Aquino’s last State of the Nation Address, his tuwid na daan (straight path) rhetoric is starting to unravel anew, Ridon said.

“These figures reveal that DAP is very much alive, and that the President’s fiscal dictatorship is being practiced blatantly under everyone’s noses,” Ridon said.

‘Awesome, challenging target’

Sen. Ralph Recto also pointed out the government expenditures in its goal to finish 85,000 classrooms by the end of President Aquino term next year.

He said the government has to find a way to produce an average of 254 classrooms a day between now and June 2016.

Recto described this as an “awesome but challenging target” of the Aquino administration, which would require a minor miracle based on the current pace of classroom construction by the Department of Education and Department of Public Works and Highways. – With Marvin Sy