Budget Secretary Florencio Abad. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO / GRIG C. MONTEGRANDE
MANILA, Philippines — Senators knew about the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) as early as October 2011, Budget Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad told a Senate hearing on Thursday.
Facing the hearing of the Senate committee on finance, Abad reminded that they had presented the DAP before the same body.
“Allow me first to thank the honorable senators for giving the Department of Budget and Management and my colleagues in the Executive another opportunity to speak about the Disbursement Acceleration Program,” he said in his opening statement.
“As you may remember, I had already presented DAP to the Senate committee on finance in October 2011, during the presentation of the proposed 2012 National Budget. I am very grateful that you have once again welcomed us into these halls to explain DAP anew, and this time for the benefit of the larger public,” he said.
Abad said they presented the DAP to the committee as a “viable solution for accelerating government expenditures.”
“We knew that this could be done. After all, the generation and use of savings of which DAP is an example is not a new practice,” he said.
Under the leadership of the late President Cory Aquino, Abad said, the use of savings “took the form of the imposition of reserves, where allocations were withheld because of a fiscal deficit.”
“The practice was thus named the Reserve Control Account,” he said.
Abad said this way of using savings continued on in the Ramos and Estrada administrations. Under the Arroyo administration, he said, the practice was plainly dubbed the “use of Overall Savings.”
And while the DAP was launched without fanfare in 2011, he said his office, the Department of Budget and Management, issued a statement announcing the program’s implementation.
“However, when DAP finally began making headlines in 2013, we were frequently told that nobody had heard of it. Some groups even implied that the program had been deliberately kept under wraps so that the DBM could avoid the burden of accountability,” Abad said.
“But this is ridiculous. Not only did the DBM announce the existence of DAP from its very inception; the launching of DAP was covered by major broadsheets, including the Manila Bulletin, Business Mirror, and Philippine Daily Inquirer,” he pointed out.
Abad stressed that DAP wasn’t implemented “without thought or design.”
It was strategic not only in its purpose, but also in its implementation. Remember that we designed DAP not just to speed up spending, but to use public funds to spur socio-economic development,” he said.
Abad also said the practice of “cross-border” transfers of savings was “not uncommon.”
“Historically speaking, cross-border transfers of savings from one branch of government to another or to fiscally autonomous agencies were not uncommon,” he said.
Over the last 22 years, he said, savings have been used “to augment the budgets of Congress, the judiciary and other constitutional bodies independent from all three branches of government.”
“Not only has it been done before, we knew that we could implement DAP because the law permitted it,” he added.
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