‘LGUs bloating areas for bigger IRA’

Local government units in Mindanao are exaggerating their land areas in a bid to acquire bigger revenue allotments from the national government, Environment Secretary Jesus Paje told senators on Monday.

But if Congress gives his department P5 billion to finish the cadastral survey of the entire country, the government can establish the correct land areas of all cities and municipalities and have a better basis for Internal Revenue Allotments (IRA) distributed to them.

The IRA is an allowance received by all local government units (LGUs) from the national government. Its amount is based on a local unit’s land area, population and tax collections remitted to the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

“If we check the (land area) submissions (from) some parts of Mindanao, the total hectarage of the Philippines (would be) 34 million when it is only 30 million,” Paje told reporters after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ (DENR) first budget hearing in the Senate.

“Some (LGUs) do this to get a bigger IRA so we will definitely find that out (whether they are misleading us) if we do an actual land survey,” he said.

Not complete

Paje lamented that the cadastral survey the government initiated “a century ago” has not yet been completed. There are still 5.6 million hectares all over the country that have not yet been subjected to a survey.

The DENR needs P5 billion, spread out between 2012 and 2013, to fund this effort, he added.

Paje noted that DENR surveyors avoided going to the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in particular.

Senate finance committee chair Franklin Drilon said this was because “they are met with Armalites” by parties involved in land area misdeclaration.

Sen. Edgardo Angara observed that “some barangays keep expanding and moving their mojon (markers) because of the allocation of the IRA.”

“This has already resulted in conflicts. The boundary disputes are not settled by courts but politically by the municipal councils, so the problem is perennial and unsolvable…We cannot leave this matter to politicians who want a larger IRA,” Angara said.

Drilon said a cadastral survey was important because it would determine the political boundaries of local governments as well as the properties of private owners.

100 years ago

“One hundred years has passed and still we have about 5.6 million hectares that have not been surveyed, have no boundaries and cannot be defined clearly,” he said in an impromptu press briefing after the budget hearing.

The senator also blamed “the overlapping of boundaries” among at least five government bodies for aggravating the problem.

Drilon said the Bureau of Lands, Department of Agrarian Reform, National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, Land Registration Authority and local courts are all involved in land titling.

“Five agencies appear to be doing their own titling and therefore the possibility of overlapping of titles is always there,” he said.

Drilon said there was a pending request with President Aquino to issue an executive order “to refrain (the five) agencies from issuing titles while (the DENR is) threshing out this problem.”