Abad confirms he offered Tacloban City advance IRA

Budget Secretary Florencio B. Abad. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

BAGUIO CITY—Budget Secretary Florencio Abad on Thursday said Tacloban City’s decision to decline an offer to advance its share of the Internal Revenue Allotment (IRA) did not help city residents hit by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” last year.

Abad was reacting to the assertion made by Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez that the IRA advances would have violated disbursement rules and could have left the city bankrupt had it used all of its P450-million IRA in restoring some of the city’s public facilities.

The IRA represents taxes and revenues collected by the national government in a year, to which local governments are entitled a 40-percent share.

“Why would you be reluctant to advance money so you can help your constituents right away? This is not the money of the national government. This is the money of the local government,” Abad said here on Thursday.

“So I would find more reasons to get that money and not reasons not to receive that money. Sometimes, that kind of reaction confuses people,” he said.

Abad was in Baguio City to discuss fiscal management reforms at the Good Governence Dialogues, a road show organized by the Department of Budget and Management, Union of Local Authorities of the Philippines and civil society organizations.

Romualdez had told a radio station in Cebu City recently that he rejected Abad’s offer “on the advice of our lawyer.” He said he had asked Abad if the city could use some city funds to provide gasoline to local police for mobilization.

“Instead, he offered us to advance our IRA,” Romualdez said. “We don’t know what will be [the advanced IRA’s] source …. It may come from the Development Acceleration Program (DAP),” he said.

The DAP was a budgetary process used by Abad in 2011 to speed up public spending by realigning unused funds to priority programs. The Supreme Court declared parts of it unconstitutional.

Abad said the IRA was in the national treasury and would not have come from the DAP. “There is sufficient basis for advancing it because there was a calamity,” he said.

In Cebu City, the Office of Presidential Assistant for Rehabilitation and Recovery (Oparr) said P7 billion was poured into Tacloban City by the national government in the form of projects.

In a TV interview, however, Romualdez challenged the people to ask village officials in his city to locate those projects, since there were none.

Lawyer Karen Jimeno, Oparr communications director, said the projects were channeled through different government agencies.

Jimeno said the P6-billion fund, which rehabilitation czar Panfilo Lacson was referring to, had risen to P7 billion, based on the reports submitted by the national agencies. Reports from Vincent Cabreza, Inquirer Northern Luzon, and Connie Fernandez, Inquirer Visayas