Ex-DOF chief: Reallocating idle funds for emergency response not new
The PhilHealth Local Health Insurance Office (LHIO) in Caloocan. Photo from PhilHealth’s website
MANILA, Philippines — Reallocating idle government funds to respond to national emergencies is not a new practice, former Finance Secretary Margarito Teves told the Supreme Court.
Teves is one of the amici curiae (friends of the court) during the oral argument on the petitions assailing the transfer of P89.9-billion unutilized funds of PhilHealth to the national treasury.
He said even previous administrations did similar fund sweeps to address local crises.
“In the case of President [Fidel] Ramos, it was done when the Philippines and Asia were confronted with the Asian financial crisis. I recall he said, ‘let’s try to get all the balances from different institutions that are now in the different banks and utilize this to address the crisis,” Teves said.
Teves said that during his time as secretary of the Department of Finance, they managed to address the fiscal challenge and even recorded a surplus following the reallocation of idle funds.
He said, “special funds tend to have a tendency to increase” and that “there probably should be a way of making use of these funds if they are not utilized.”
He added that under the Duterte administration, government balances were again reallocated as part of the COVID-19 response.
“These circumstances, in fact, were already there,” Teves explained, adding that even in 2024, the lingering effects of the pandemic necessitated the expansion of unprogrammed appropriations.
Teves’ explanation gave weight to the position of Finance Secretary Ralph Recto, who maintained that transferring idle, unused, and excess government subsidies, such as PhilHealth’s, back to the National Treasury is constitutional.
“Sleeping funds serve no one,” Recto said. “Every peso unused is a benefit denied to a Filipino citizen.”
“We wouldn’t be doing our job, Your Honors if we willfully neglect our duty to exercise fiscal prudence in this matter just because it is unusual. We wouldn’t be doing our job if we clung to convention over common sense,” he added.
