Capitol to explore options to boost province revenues

Better revenue collection and creating more economic enterprises through public-private partnerships  are the Capitol’s solutions to the possible reduction of its internal revenue allotment in 2012.

Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia said these would be two revenue-generating options of the province.

Garcia proposed the measures after the Supreme Court decided with finality the cityhood of 16 cities, which included Naga, Carcar and Bogo in Cebu.

The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) released on June 27 a local budget memorandum, which discusses the IRA level and related budget preparation matters for fiscal year 2012.

The memorandum states that with the Supreme Court cityhood decision, the IRA will be divided to 136 cities compared to the previous 120 cities.

The budget department already released P71.74 billion IRA share of local government units in the first quarter of the year.

Section 9 of the General Appropriations Act (GAA) states that “any adjustments that occurred, including final and executory court decisions rendered, and such other changes, modifications or alterations in any of the factors affecting the computations of IRA that occurred, rendered on happened in fiscal year (FY) 2011 shall only be considered and implemented in FY 2012.”

Garcia said last week that the province would not want to be dependent on the IRA.

“With or without the reduction of IRA, we have always pushed for our own internally generated revenues to be increased through aggressive pursuit of economic enterprises,” she said.