Congress ratifies P1.8-T budget for 2012

Congress on Tuesday approved the proposed P1.816 trillion national budget for 2012 as both chambers overwhelming ratified the bicameral committee report on the spending bill.

Senator Franklin Drilon, chairman of the Senate finance committee, said President Benigno Aquino III was expected to sign the measure into law on December 15.

“We want to pass this so that by January the budget would be in place,” Drilon told reporters shortly after the ratification, adding that the passage of the general appropriations bill was the fastest in recent history.

In overwhelmingly ratifying the bill, the House of Representatives left untouched the allocation of P39.4 billion for the government’s conditional cash  program (CCT) and the P22 billion outlay for the Public Private Partnership.

Conservative spending

House Minority Leader Edcsel Lagman, however, said the CCT and PPP outlays were inordinately overstated and excessively funded.

The Aquino administration has been criticized for its conservative public spending, which was among the reasons behind the economy’s lackluster 3.2-percent growth in the third quarter.

The 2012 national budget maintained P1.245 trillion in new appropriations contained in the national expenditure program submitted to Congress by the executive department. The rest of the national budget represented automatic appropriations such as those for debt servicing and internal revenue allotment.

But Senator Joker Arroyo voted against the bicameral conference committee report, which reconciled the disagreeing provisions of the budget. He said the report contained no safeguards against the possibility of government “hoarding” taxes collected from the people.

“The government is not expected to hoard or park (them),” he said in a statement. “It is the government’s duty to return (them) to the people by spending (them) for projects that benefit the people. The bicameral report did not check the hoarding. On the contrary, it condoned it.”

Arroyo also noted that the 2012 budget contained lump sum appropriations which were a temptation for corruption.

But this was denied by Drilon. “The fact is that there are no hidden lump sum appropriations,” he said.

The approved 2012 budget took away P697.8 million from the controversial miscellaneous personnel benefits fund (MPBF), which would collect all unspent appropriations for unfilled positions throughout the bureaucracy. With a report from Maila Ager, INQUIRER.net

Originally posted: 05:08 pm | Wednesday, November 29th, 2011