‘Congress should plug loopholes in spending law on use of secret funds’

Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian —SENATE PRIB

Congress will have to plug loopholes in the country’s spending law to stop and prevent the misuse and abuse of discretionary funds, including contingency as well as confidential and intelligence funds (CIF), Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian said on Saturday.

Gatchalian, chair of the Senate ways and means committee, conceded that the wording of the 2022 General Appropriations Act (GAA) may have given the executive department some elbow room in the use of contingency funds, including the questioned transfer of P125 million to the office of Vice President Sara Duterte.

“Congress will have to continue to look into how agencies spent these funds, and check whether the previous spending actually helped mitigate the problem for which it was intended,” he said in a radio interview.

“Agencies cannot be invoking the same lines of justification every year, yet we do not see any improvement in the situation,” he said.

Citing figures culled from the 2024 National Expenditure Program, Gatchalian said the Senate will also have to scrutinize the proposed funding for a contingency fund next year, amounting to P13 billion.

In addition to contingency funds, senators will also ask agencies to justify their request for CIF, amounting to more than P10.1 billion, as soon as it starts deliberations on the P5.77-trillion proposed national budget for 2024.

Of that amount, the executive department is requesting P5.28 billion in intelligence funds and P4.864 billion in confidential funds in the proposed 2024 GAA.

This year, Duterte is seeking a total of P650 million in confidential funds—P500 million for the Office of the Vice President and P150 million for the Department of Education.

Duterte received the same amounts in the 2023 GAA.

In a 2021 Inquirer report, party list group Bayan Muna flagged the use of up to P10.3 billion in contingency funds as “Palace pork barrel.”

Former Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares said that in 2020, Malacañang officials transferred P10.3 billion of the 2020 “contingent fund” for 344 public works projects they purportedly handpicked.

The contingent fund is commonly designed by the GAA to “cover the funding requirements of new or urgent projects and activities of national government agencies and GOCCs (government-owned and controlled corporations) that need to be implemented or paid during the year.”

Last week, the Vice President’s admission that her office received P125 million in contingency funds from the 2022 GAA, which she later used for confidential expenses, drew flak from her critics.

The 2022 GAA was approved during the incumbency of then President Rodrigo Duterte, the Vice President’s father.

According to Gatchalian, Congress intended contingency funds to be used for unforeseen expenditures such as disaster response.

But Congress may also take out the CIF items if it sees that the programs, activities, and projects for which agencies used the fund may be placed in line items in the budget, to make it more transparent and open to public scrutiny, the senator said.

READ: House panel keeps P4.8-B confidential funds intact