Abad: Release order incorporated in budget
Budget
Secretary Florencio Abad said Thursday an agency can begin obligating
funds as soon as the 2014 GAA is implemented on the very first working
day of the fiscal year. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
Goodbye Saros.
The Department of Budget and Management
(DBM) announced Thursday the demise of special allotment release orders
(Saros), which were faked last year as part of what it called a
“well-established and highly coordinated racket.”
That’s because the General Appropriations
Act (GAA) is now considered the government’s “official budget release
document.” As a result, departments and agencies “will no longer need to
secure Saros to obligate funds,” the DBM said.
In a statement, Budget Secretary Florencio
Abad said an agency could instead begin obligating funds as soon as the
2014 GAA was implemented on the very first working day of the fiscal
year.
“With the new GAA-as-release-document
regime in place, however, and the fact that Saros are no longer needed
for many of the fund releases we’ll be making this year, we don’t just
intend to accelerate releases so that they can properly fund our key
programs and projects,” Abad said.
“We also mean to thwart those who’ve made
the budget implementation process a hotbed of graft and corruption. This
is part of our deliberate, focused campaign to facilitate greater
transparency and accountability in the expenditure process, so that
every peso spent by government will indeed benefit all Filipinos.”
Saro Gang in DBM
The National Bureau of Investigation is still probing the use of bogus Saros for farm-to-market roads worth P879 million.
The NBI has identified some of the members
of the “Saro Gang” alleged to be responsible for the photocopying of
original Saro to secure the release of pork barrel funds for public
projects.
Justice Secretary Leila de Lima last week said the fake Saro syndicate was composed of DBM employees and congressional staff.
Relampagos’ driver, janitor
De Lima said the NBI was looking at the
alleged participation of a driver and a janitor in the office of Budget
Undersecretary Mario Relampagos. “We have their names but we can’t
reveal them yet. The NBI is still looking into other personnel.”
Abad said the DBM was made aware in 2013
“of a well-established and highly coordinated racket that centered on
the dissemination of fake Saros.”
“Altogether,
however, it appears that unscrupulous individuals have taken advantage
of the necessity of release documents so that these parties were able to
profit from the distribution of fake Saros.”
P2.265T budget
Last Dec. 20, President Aquino signed the
general appropriations act for this year’s national budget worth P2.265
trillion. Six days later, he signed the P14.6-billion supplemental
budget, mainly for the rehabilitation of areas devastated by
Supertyphoon “Yolanda” and other recent calamities.
Of the supplemental budget, P11.2 billion
will be used to augment the existing calamity fund, while P3.4 billion
will be added to the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s
“quick response fund.”
In the past, the DBM issued Saros to allow
the release of funds for lump-sum items, such as the Priority
Development Assistance Fund, a pork barrel of legislators that the
Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional on Nov. 19, 2013.
Lump sums need approval
But in the so-called “new regime,” a “first
of its kind in the country’s governance history,” where the national
budget document itself already authorizes budget release, lump-sum
allocations will still require approval before they are released.
These will include “lump-sum funds within
an agency’s budget that have not been itemized prior to the approval and
enactment of the 2014 GAA, as well as Special Purpose Funds (SPF),
including Budgetary Support to Government Corporations.”
Primary release document
Abad said the 2014 GAA, as signed by Aquino, was the government’s primary budget release document.
“This means that all the disaggregated
budget items in the GAA are already considered released to their
respective agencies, with the exception of lump-sum funds that have yet
to be itemized and which will require prior approval before their
release.”
Critics consider the SPF as the President’s
own pork barrel because of their lump-sum nature and because they could
not be released without his approval.
The SPF amounted to P232.49 billion in 2011
and increased to P376.27 billion and P385.47 billion in 2012 and 2013,
respectively.—Christian V. Esguerra
No comments:
Post a Comment