P3.76-T nat’l budget will be approved on time, House assures Senate

Leaders of the House of Representatives on Friday assured their counterparts in the Senate that the Duterte administration’s P3.757-trillion budget for 2019 would be approved on time.

Speaker Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said representatives of both chambers of Congress had already conducted a prebicameral conference committee meeting to discuss issues concerning next year’s allocations.

No reenacted budget

Asked if there was a possibility that the government may have a reenacted budget, Arroyo said, “I don’t think so.”

Majority Leader Rolando Andaya Jr. said legislators still had enough time to submit the budget for President Duterte’s approval next month.

The Camarines Sur lawmaker said the House was keen on passing a budget which would be “100 percent compliant with the rules of Congress, with all the laws on budgeting and with the jurisprudence on appropriations.”

‘Rigorous verification’

“We would like to convey our assurance to the Senate [that] the 2019 national budget bill will be transmitted as soon as we are done with our rigorous … verification of the thousands of line items,” Andaya said.

The passage of the annual budget temporarily hit a snag after the House and the Department of Budget and Management locked horns over the latter’s insistence on the use of cash-based allocations, a policy which lawmakers rejected for supposedly being impractical.