Sen. Panfilo “Ping” Lacson, the lone senator who voted against the bicameral committee report on the spending bill, cited the questionable increase in the budget of the DPWH despite its poor disbursement record.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, December 10) — A senator on Thursday continued to question the bicameral report which increased the Department of Public Works and Highways’ budget in the 2021 General Appropriations Bill, alluding to the possibility the funds would be used for election campaign.
Here are the top 10 government agencies that received the highest allocations in the ₱4.5-trillion national budget for…
Posted by CNN Philippines on Wednesday, December 9, 2020
The bicameral conference committee approved the budget on Wednesday morning, while the Senate and the House of Representatives separately ratified the proposed national budget in their respective chambers later in the day.
The DPWH stands as the agency with the second highest budget of ₱694.8 billion for 2021, after the education sector’s ₱708.2 billion funding.
Lacson noted that the bicameral conference committee increased the agency’s allocation by ₱28.3 billion compared with the initially proposed DPWH budget of ₱666.5 billion under the National Expenditure Program. This was despite DPWH’s history of unused appropriations worth ₱81.9 billion from 2011 to 2018, and a disbursement rate of only 37.8%, he said.
“What is the logic of further increasing the budget of the agency in 2021 considering the challenges brought about by the pandemic?…What is the logic of further increasing the budget of an agency with such low utilization record?” Lacson said Wednesday in the plenary.
Lacson earlier recommended that at least ₱60 billion from the DPWH’s proposed budget for 2021 for multi-purpose buildings be realigned to other sectors. He questioned why nearly 800 line items for such buildings had a uniform ₱1-million appropriation each.
“I will not mention anymore the locations because I don’t want to put some people on the spot. Suffice it to say that I know where additional funds for MPBs went to, or are intended to be appropriated. So let’s leave it at that,” he said.
The senator lamented that amid this hike, the budget for the Department of Information and Communications Technology’s national broadband program was greatly reduced to around ₱1.9 billion, even after both chambers initially sought to increase its total budget to ₱5.9 billion.
Allegations of corruptions inside the DPWH are not new. In October, the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission identified congressional districts with allegedly anomalous infrastructure projects, tracing the problem to lawmakers’ influence in the choice of engineers and contractors. The agency was also criticized for its overpricing and delayed implementation of some infrastructure projects in 2019, which the Commission on Audit flagged.
Senate finance committee chair Sonny Angara said the bicameral report was done through a “collegial” decision.
House appropriations committee chair Eric Go Yap earlier denied Lacson’s allegation that some districts, especially of congressmen allied with Speaker Lord Allan Velasco, got bigger allocations for supposed infrastructure projects. He added that budget for districts were based on their needs.
Election budget?
“The net increase…could only indicate massive realignments and insertions introduced by the legislators. It begs the question: is this an election campaign budget?” Lacson said in a statement on Thursday.
Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque, a congressman before joining Malacañang, said there was a “substantial increase” in the agency’s absorptive capacity or ability to utilize received allocations over the past years.
“Ang alam ko po, noong lumipat na ako sa Malacañang, substantial po talaga yung pagtaas ng absorptive capacity na tinatawag ng DPWH…Kung hindi nagagastos ang pondo nung mga nakalipas na taon, bakit nga naman sila bibigyan ng mas mataas pang pondo?” he said.
[Translation: As far as I can remember, when I moved to Malacañang, there was a substantial increase in the absorptive capacity of the DPWH…If an agency’s funds were not properly utilized over the past years, then why would they be given higher funding?]
President Rodrigo Duterte has yet to receive the 2021 General Appropriations Bill, Roque said. He assured that the President will have enough time to go through the budget and examine whether specific items needed to be vetoed.
Congress allotted at least a week for the encoding and printing of the budget in book form before it is submitted to Malacañang for his signature.
