2020 national budget must specify MVUC-funded projects — Recto

MANILA, Philippines — The proposed P4.1-trillion national budget for 2020 must comply with the Road Board abolition law, which requires all projects funded by motor registration fees to be specified in the annual General Appropriations Act (GAA), Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto reminded Malacañang yesterday.

Recto said the executive branch should make sure that next year’s spending bill will be in accordance with Republic Act 11239, which President Duterte signed last April 8. 

RA 11239 abolished the Road Board and decreed that all Motor Vehicle User’s Charge (MVUC) collections be remitted to the National Treasury and placed in a special account in the General Fund.

Monies under the account will be “earmarked solely for the construction, upgrading, repair and rehabilitation of roads, bridges and road drainage to be included in the annual GAA,” the law states.

“This is the very important sunshine provision in the law abolishing the Road Board. It means that projects funded by MVUC must be itemized and presented, in the interest of transparency, as MVUC-funded projects,” Recto said.

“That’s the way to do it. Full disclosure. So that vehicle owners will know where the registration fees they have paid will go,” he said. 

If MVUC-funded projects are comingled with other items in the Department of Public Works and Highways budget, and the projects they are supposed to finance are lumped together with other items, Recto said “the intent of making them distinct and separate is disobeyed.”

He said all MVUC-funded projects must be placed in “one box only” so taxpayers would know how much was collected from motor vehicle owners, where will it go and whether the projects are in line with the menu stated in the law.

“If this will not be done, then we will be going back to the old system of treating MVUC collections as off-budget expenditures. If the projects are not clearly declared, but instead hidden and in lump sum, it would be like we’re back to the old practice,” Recto said.

Unspent MVUC collections stood at P46.25 billion as of late last year. For 2019, government projects to raise P13.9 billion from vehicle registration fees, which are collected by Land Transportation Office.