FILE PHOTO: Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon. (Screen grab/Senate PRIB)
MANILA, Philippines — The Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) was quizzed Monday over the low utilization of its 2021 budget with Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon pointing out that merely transferring money to regional offices does not mean fund usage.
During the Senate deliberations on the proposed 2022 budget of TESDA, Drilon said that for every P100 budget of the agency, only P30.89 is spent.
“Even just on the present budget, it would appear that the disbursement rate when we talk about the budget allotment is a poor 30.89 percent. If TESDA cannot even disburse on time the budgeted amount, how can we be so confident that they will be able to disburse an additional P7.8 billion?” Drilon asked.
According to Tesda Director General Isidro Lapeña, the agency had low budget utilization for the years 2019 and 2020 because of the delayed release of the budget and health crisis, respectively. He, however, asserted that for the current year, the Tesda’s disbursement rate is at 85 percent. as of September 24.
“For the year 2019 and 2020, the reason why there was a lower rate of the disbursement is because of the delay in the release of the [budget] for that year as it was released only in March and April… but towards the end, we have still used up fairly well our budget,” Lapeña said.
“For the year 2020, this was affected by the COVID-19 health crisis and practically for the first semester, there was a non-activity but we have tried to catch up in the next semester of the year,” he added.
But Drilon asked if the transfer of funds from the central office of Tesda to its regional sites is already included in the reported budget utilization, to which Lapeña replied in the affirmative.
“I don’t think that’s the correct way of doing it. You’re saying that when you transfer funds from the central office to the regional office, that is already considered as utilization when in fact you are just transferring it from one office to another?” Drilon said.
“Ang feeling ko, niloloko kami eh,” the Seante leader also said. “Budget utilization rate, but that consists mainly of the transfers to the regional office.”
Drilon added that Tesda’s report does not give a “true picture of the utilization because they can even report 100 percent by transferring on the first week all the funds to the regional offices.”
“This is a misleading presentation of your ability to utilize the budget granted to you by Congress…” the senator said.
Lapeña later clarified that utilization only happens when the regional office transfers funds to the provincial office based on enrollment reports. Disbursement then happens when the obligated services have been paid.
This was not the first time that Tesda was grilled over its thin budget utilization.
During the budget deliberations in the House of Representatives, the proposed budget of Tesda was even deferred at one point as some lawmakers pointed out the agency’s “poor utilization” of and “questionable practices” over its funds.