MANILA, Philippine—The Department of Health (DOH) has been slow to use loans for foreign-assisted projects (FAPs), delaying the implementation of vital health care programs for poor households and costing the government P79 million in commitment fees from 2007 to 2010, according to the Commission on Audit (COA).
Commitment fees are charged by lenders when recipients fail to disburse funds as scheduled.
The COA said that as of 2010, several DOH FAPs had been either delayed or unimplemented, and the loans and grants for them were not completely utilized.
The reasons for these included the discontinuance or changes in the planned activities; the absence of officials to closely supervise the various programs, and the failure to comply with documentary requirements on the release of funds.
The COA said the DOH “has a low absorptive capacity as far as the implementation of FAPs, which resulted in the nonattainment of intended objectives …”
The DOH for its part, assured the COA it was reviewing and monitoring the projects regularly, and that a coordinator had been hired to monitor the progress of the projects. It has also doubled its efforts to implement the planned activities and is closely coordinating with its partners and technical coordinators to resolve implementation issues.
In its 2010 report on the DOH released recently, the audit agency said the FAPs included a women’s health and safe motherhood project intended to bring reproductive health care to indigent women; a health reform program to increase utilization of health services by the poor and to increase their financial protection from the costs of health care; a program to assist the DOH in increasing the use of affordable and financially sustainable health services; and a project to improve the poor’s accessibility to quality and equitable essential health services.
The COA found that fund disbursements for some of the projects were lower than what was targeted, and there was delayed procurement and late submission of deliverables by consultants, as well as delayed utilization of loans.
Some activities were also discontinued because these had been undertaken by other funded programs. The training for certain projects was not conducted because the necessary curricula were not completed, while consultants were not hired because of bidding problems.
The project officers informed the COA that it also took time to produce a final list of indigents because of the different databases used. Delays in completing the required documentation prior to the release of funds also hampered the projects.
Among the COA recommendations were: The preparation of a database of all existing programs to avoid duplication of activities; the active involvement of technical units; implementation of work and financial plans with minimal changes; the assistance of partner local government units in submitting the required loan documents, and the strengthening of coordination with other project development partners for the prompt resolution of funding and implementation issues.