Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO/RYAN LEAGOGO
MANILA, Philippines—There’s no record of the Aquino administration’s controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) in the Senate committee on finance, Sen. Francis Escudero said on Tuesday.
“DAP is a slogan. DAP is a nomenclature. It’s a name. It’s not an item in the budget. That’s what they call the use of savings for the projects of the government,” Escudero, chair of Senate committee on finance, told reporters.
“Having no item in the budget identified as DAP doesn’t make it illegal because it is just a slogan,” he said.
Escudero, nonetheless, said that his committee was collating the records of senators’ requests for millions of pesos worth of projects.
On whether the records should be made public, Escudero said, “Yes, if you were to ask me. But that is being discussed in the caucus as well, so we’d know what to do.”
A handful of senators and a former senator were earlier reported to have requested in late 2011 funding for projects worth P100 million on top of their respective pork barrel allocations worth P200 million each.
The funding was allegedly released through the DAP.
Senate Majority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano later said most of the senators availed themselves of additional funds for their pet projects at that time.
“The committee on finance doesn’t even have a record of the DAP. In fact, none of the letters that the committee of finance has even mentioned about DAP. DAP is a creation of the executive branch,” Escudero said.
“Even for us senators and congressmen, it was the first time we heard about the DAP from [Budget] Secretary [Florencio] Abad and we did not even know that the requests for funding were charged there,” Escudero added.
Abad said the DAP was pooled from savings of agencies and was meant to pump-prime the economy when gross domestic product growth slowed down after the new Aquino administration tightened fund releases.