Noynoy had pork of P700B in 2012 DAP

By Angie M. Rosales
The Daily Tribune 

DBM Secretary Florencio Abad and Pres. Aquino

President Aquino may keep on claiming that his economic stimulus package called Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP), which he and his Department of Budget and Management (DBM) chief defend as having been created to increase government spending in 2011, is not pork and should not be equated with the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF).

However, contrary to his claim, Aquino had, for his DAP, a whopping P700 billion, with allegations of billions used to bribe legislators from both houses of Congress to impeach and convict former Chief Justice Renato Corona, as well as using the DAP funds for transactional politics.

A former senator, who has made his stand clear of his being against the DAP, bared Thursday that Malacañang had at one point a potential P700 billion at its disposal for the said fiscal plan.

The amount being referred to by former Sen. Panfilo Lacson was during the fiscal year 2012, the same year when the Corona impeachment trial was culminated with a conviction after Corona was found guilty of the articles of impeachment filed against him.

Earlier, there were charges that Aquino had paid off the legislators in the House of Representatives to initiate animpeachment complaint against the sitting chief justice and rushed the articles of impeachment, which was clearly flawed, and not even read by legislators who had signed the impeachment complaint.

Later this year, Sen. Jinggoy Estrada “unwittingly” exposed DAP funds being supposedly the source of funding mechanism by the Executive for the additional P50 million to P100 million each pork barrel to some senators.
Lacson made the disclosure regarding the supposed funding source of DAP in the past before the members of the Philippine Constitution Association (Philconsa), one of the petitioners before the Supreme Court, questioning its unconstitutionality, during a speaking engagement at the Manila Golf Club in Makati City.

The former lawmaker threw his support behind Philconsa’s petition, even commending its members for their efforts in questioning the constitutionality of the DAP before the Supreme Court.

“I fully support your petition — not to put President Aquino in a bad light, or declare an all-out war against the DAP, because I personally believe, as a layman who also knows and understands certain simple provisions of the Constitution, that DAP per se in neither bad nor illegal,” Lacson said in his speech.

Lacson, who is an ally of Aquino, said he believes in the President’s honesty, adding that “I want to help him succeed in his well-intentioned “Daang Matuwid” vision for this benighted land.”

Lacosn stressed that Aquino must initiate the move to correct the mistake of a constitutionallyinfirm act of augmenting non existing items in the GAA (General Appropriations Act), and worse, realigning savings in the budget of the executive branch to the legislature in obvious violation of Art. VI, Sec. 25, para 5 of the 1987 Constitution.

“I hope he does it while there is still time to rectify the flawed program and possibly render the pending petitions moot and academic,” he added.

Lacson himself noted the admission from the DBM on its claims that the P50 million to P100 million in additional pork barrel allocations to most senators after the conviction of the former chief justice in May 2012 came from DAP, funded by savings in 2011.

An undisclosed number of congressmen likewise received at least P10M in additional PDAF under the same program, he noted.

In the bid of DBM chief Florencio “Butch” Abad, a high Liberal Party Official and close aide and adviser of Aquino, to cover up charges of using public funds to bribe senators to convict Corona, Abad came up with a list of senators whom he claimed had also obtained their pork, listing down former Senators Joker Arroyo, who had voted to acquit and Lacson, who had voted to convict, as having gotten their share of the DAP.

That was when the whole cover-up of Aquino and Abad using DAP as the source of funding the “stimulus” infrastructure by the senators blew up, as both senators said the funds did not come from DAP, of which all senators claimed to have been completely unaware, pointing out that the amounts and projects were part of the budget which they had inserted in the budget.

Lacson pointed out that the “unused appropriations” in the GAA in 2011 amounted to P238.8 billion consisting of unreleased appropriations of P79.6 billion and unobligated allotments of P159.2 billion while in 2012, the total unused appropriations amounted to P216.1 billionm broken down into unreleased appropriations of P38.1 billion and unobligated allotments of P178 billion.

“It is mainly due to Budget Circular 541, issued by the DBM last July 18, 2012 authorizing the DBM to pool all Unobligated Allotments of agencies with low levels of obligations as of June 30, 2012, both for continuing and current allotments.

“Initially, it was to cover all unfilled positions in all three branches of government including the constitutional bodies. The DBM backpedalled and withdrew when the Congress, CoA, Ombudsman and the Supreme Court strongly objected to what we perceived as an encroachment by the executive into the fiscal autonomy of these offices.

“Budget Circular 543, issued on Oct. 10, 2012 on the other hand, shortened the validity of appropriations starting CY 2013 to one year instead of the usual two year validity period for the MOOE and Capital Outlay.
“The twin circulars, needless to say, are indicative of a fiscal dictatorship by the DBM. But we are only dealing here with savings in the GAA under the budget item, Unused Appropriations which I mentioned earlier.

“If we add to the P216.1B in Unused Appropriations in CY 2012, the other potential sources of funds may come from budget items identified as (a) Earmarked Revenues amounting to P71.4B; (b) Continuing Appropriations – P163.6B; (c) Overall Savings of P65,6B; and (d) Unprogrammed Funds of P152.8B. Therefore, just in the 2012 GAA alone, we could end up with a whopping P669 billion which can be generated for the DAP,” he said.
Lacson himself said that he was one of the many congressmen and senators, both active and retired, who was taken by surprise in the DBM’s claims that DAP has been in existence since 2011.

“It must be recalled that the Aquino administration was severely criticized in 2011 for underspending due to a very low absorptive capacity of practically all the departments and their line agencies.

“The DBM said that it is only 9 percent of a total of P142.23B that it had given to the lawmakers in 2011 at 2012. That is true—9 percent or P12.8 billion. The P12.8 billion is 51 percent of the total P24.8 billion of pork barrel of the legislators every year,” he said.

“If the programs and projects were actual budgetary items in the GAA, why was there a need for the endorsement of legislators? If the projects did not appear in the GAA and therefore are still to be identified by the legislator recipients of additional PDAF under DAP, clearly, there were no items in the 2011 and 2012 GAA’s to be augmented. Worse, the realignment crossed over from the executive branch to the legislative,” he pointed out.

Lacson said that under Article VI, Sec 25, paragraph 5 of the Constitution, it provides that “no law shall be passed authorizing the transfer of appropriations; however, the President, Senate President, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the heads of constitutional commissions may, by law, be authorized to augment any item in the general appropriations law for ‘their respective offices from savings in other items of their respective appropriations’.”

“Having said that, we leave it to the SC to resolve the issue of constitutionality of the DAP as raised by Philconsa and five other petitioners.

“While I have no reason to compare President Aquino to former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in handling government funds, too much fiscal discretion by any branch of government will not only be unsupportive of the principle of check and balance, but will affect the fiscal management efficiency of the national government,” he said.

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