2023 budget deliberations must tackle spending delays, procurement – Recto

House Deputy Speaker Ralph Recto (File photo from the Senate Public Relations and Information Bureau)

MANILA, Philippines — The 19th Congress should discuss spending delays and questionable procurement in its deliberations on the 2023 budget, House Deputy Speaker Ralph Recto said in a statement issued on Monday.

“When it comes to public spending, the problem is not in budget authorization, or when Congress approves the budget, but in budget execution, when agencies spend the budget given to them,” Recto said.  “The budget is supposed to be spent for the right purpose, at the right time, by the right agency, for the right price.”

“But COA reports on procurement fiascos and huge unobligated amounts are a continuing indictment of the failure to obligate funds promptly and properly.  That failure betrays the public because the tax-budget dynamic is that taxes paid by the people without disputing must be spent for projects that would benefit them without delay,” he added.

‘Elephant in the room’

The “elephant in the room” must be discussed, Recto insisted.

Specifically, he was referring to the practice of having unobligated funds and procuring fiascos, particularly the purchases made through the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM) and the Philippine International Trading Corp. (PITC).

“The elephant in the room that must be addressed in this particular budget, through a budget provision outlawing the practice, is the parking of funds in the PS-DBM and PITC,” he said.

“What happens is that the chicken that should be cooked right away to be served to the country is first marinated for a few years in those agencies,” Recto said in Filipino.

Controversies

Both PS-DBM and PITC have been dragged into controversy due to procurement issues.

Just recently, the Commission on Audit (COA) flagged DepEd’s purchase of P2.4 billion worth of outdated but pricey laptops intended for teachers conducting online classes.

The DepEd purchased, through PS-DBM, laptops worth over P58,000 despite it having Intel Celeron processors, which are found on entry-level products.

Quick scans of the market would reveal that laptops worth over P50,000 are already at mid-level, having strong and quick processors along with huge random access memory (RAM) allocations.

Prior to the DepEd issue, the PS-DBM also found itself in the spotlight again for procuring allegedly overpriced COVID-19 personal protective equipment for the Department of Health.

That prompted a congressional inquiry where several lawmakers claimed that a startup company was favored over those selling items at a more reasonable price.

Meanwhile, COA also flagged the PITC also several times. Most recently, it was due to over P480 million worth of gear and firearms for the Philippine National Police that has remained undelivered since 2016.

Necessary for recovery

Recto said that such issues should be threshed out first if the government would want to emerge from the pandemic stronger.

“If the thrust of this budget is recovery from the pandemic, then how fast our recovery is will depend to a large extent on how fast we spend the budget,”  he said.

“There should be no repeat of last year’s budget utilization rate, when P784.8 billion remained undisbursed by end of the year, on top of P88.8 billion in unreleased appropriations,” he added.

Earlier, House officials, led by House Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, formally received the budget from DBM and Pangandaman.

Leaders in the majority expressed confidence that the budget would be scrutinized well enough and would be passed by October, or before Congress goes into a recess.

—WITH A REPORT FROM CATHERINE DABU (TRAINEE)

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