"Time to install a rearview mirror on the National Budget"
Sponsorship Speech on the 2015 National Budget
By Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph G. Recto
18 November 2014

One hundred years ago the national budget was less than 30 pages long, that when folded, members of the Philippine legislature can carry it around in their pocket.

Today, budget documents are hauled by forklifts and sent to Congress by the truckloads.

The 2015 edition, for example, can be mistaken for an encyclopedia set.

Consisting of nine documents, it is one-foot thick, almost 11 kilos in weight, crammed with 5,497 pages of print so small that I am tempted to introduce an amendment that the 2016 budget should come with a magnifying glass.

I mentioned nine documents - The Budget Message, four volumes of the National Expenditure Program or NEP, the Staffing Summary, Technical Notes, and two volumes of BESF, the second being the Budget Errata and Sources of Factual Corrections which, like budget releases, were sent in tranches.

But I must commend the overworked, underpaid number-crunchers in the DBM for cobbling together the most detailed national budget to date.

They have labored to itemize what can possibly be so, so that the NEP, for example, looks like a construction guide.

It says where piers and airports will be built and the cost of each.

The amount that every high school will receive is listed and so are the details of the grassroots budgeting process.

Performance benchmarks are also spelled out, sometimes with hilarious results. Last year, I read about a promissory note by a jail agency specifying the number of prisoners it would allow to escape.

It is good that spending is now linked to results and that peso signs in the budget are followed by performance guarantees.

This, I think, is more important than physical outcomes. In the Bureau of Fire Protection, for example, more important than the delivery of new firetrucks is their vow to be on the scene of a fire in five to seven minutes.

For the police, more important than their acquisition of new cars is their ability to rush to the scene of a crime in 15 minutes - whether by foot or by car - a promise they made in this national budget.

There is also another promissory note they issued which the people expect them to honor - and that is to run after policemen who were already on the scene of the crime before it happened.

For the DFA, more important than the processing of 3,415,487 passports and consular documents is the speed by which it is done and the smile on the faces of the people to which these papers will be issued.

I mentioned smile because in measuring agency performance, customer satisfaction, including the smileys on feedback forms, are given weight.

Speaking of speed, the DOTC guarantees that its trains will run on an average 48 kilometers per hour and will be on schedule 90 percent of the time.

The MMDA, for its part, says it will work for a 29 kilometer per hour EDSA speed. It did not say, however, if this can only be achieved past midnight.

As I said, Mr. President, the perspicacity by which details are spelled out in this budget is simply astounding. The bean counters in the DBM even counted the trees the DENR will plant next year: 300,009,500.

I hope that the DBM will, in the years to come, continue to itemize other lump sums in the budget. For example, a key program--classroom construction--remains a block grant, bereft of details.

Of course, there are lump sums which can't be itemized. The Calamity Fund, for example, because for all its virtuosity, Project NOAH is not a weather crystal ball which can tell us how many typhoons will hit us next year and the damage each one will cause.

Even if the budget will end up more voluminous as a result of itemization and thus would require a forest of newsprint to publish, it will still be a fraction of the trees DENR is planting every year.

But considering the practice a decade ago, when budget items were at best translucent rather than transparent, we have come a long way in fleshing out the budget.

However, the strength of this budget does not lie in its fine print alone but also in the macroeconomic footnotes which spell out how much we need to put our fiscal house in order.

Were once it hogs a third of the budget, debt service will taper down to 14.3 percent of expenditures next year.

While debt expenses are heading south, the budget, as percentage of the economy, is on the rise, to 18.5 percent of the GDP next year.

Revenue effort will also increase to a forecast 16.5 percent of the GDP in 2015. Deficit has been trimmed down to 1.4 percent of the GDP last year.

This has freed up funds, which instead of being remitted to creditors, are now plowed back to the people.

If it has been said that taxes are paid in cash but are rebated to the people in kind through the budget - schools, roads, hospitals - then this budget details how the reimbursements will be done.

One proof of this is that social services, with more than P900 billion, gets the lion share of the budget.

Mr. President:

Budgeting, however, is not just about looking forward. It also entails a great deal of looking back.

While the budget documents show us the road ahead, it doesn't report on the journey previously made.

It is time to install a rearview mirror on the national budget.

This is so because the stack of budget documents before us lacks one important document: and that is a report of whether or not the projects and programs funded by last year's budget have been implemented.

You can go through the almost 6,000 pages of the eight principal budget documents line by line but you won't find anything which says that the projects lovingly enumerated in the previous year's budget have been completed.

Wade through the thicket of numbers and there's nothing there which says if 61,510 teachers were indeed hired, if the plan to recruit 9,000 policemen (only 6,642 positions were filled up) pushed through, if the roads catalogued in the DPWH budget were indeed built.

My question to my friends in the executive is this:

If you were able to carefully itemize the projects when you were asking for money then, what prevents you now that you have come back to ask for more from giving us an itemized report of how the money was spent?

Perhaps what we need is a new budget accountability form which shows if a project authorized in the General Appropriations Act had indeed been implemented.

My proposal is to use the same GAA format in reporting that the projects funded last year have indeed been implemented.

The idea is for the executive to return us the same GAA, but this time it will be in annotated form.

Every funding item in the GAA will carry a corresponding note indicating when it was completed, or if it is still a work-in-progress, or if it was aborted.

If a line-item in the 2015 GAA says that P100 million is appropriated for this road in Cebu, then what we want is for the government to submit in 2016 the same GAA with a status report opposite the said line-item.

If the GAA authorizes the recruitment of, say, 10,000 new policemen and 50,000 new teachers, then what we want is for the executive to later indicate in that GAA a note stating the actual number of policemen and teachers hired.

Ang status na gusto natin ay hindi kilometric ang haba. One-liner lang or one brief sentence pwede na. In some cases, pwede nilang sabihin " implemented" and that would already suffice.

Formatting wise, hindi mahirap, kasi sabi nga nila isang Excel column lang ang idadagdag.

Sa madaling sabi, gusto natin ay gamitin ang nakaraang GAA bilang checklist kung natupad nga ba ang nakasaad dito.

Perhaps it is not too much to ask if during budget authorization phase, we need proof of implementation of projects authorized in the previous year's budget.

In any organization, the rule in asking for fund replenishment is that some liquidation of previous releases must be done first.

If sari-sari stores follow this practice, all the more that a government which spends P2.6 trillion a year should do the same.

This is needed because at present that at present it is hard for Congress or for its constituents to check if a specific project authorized in the GAA has indeed been implemented or has been realigned or its funds impounded.

Another beauty of the approach I am proposing is that lump-sum funds can be disaggregated.

Kung halimbawa block fund ang Calamity Fund, sa proposal ko itemized na sa post-budget reporting kung saan ito napunta.

The reason why there's a data vacuum in the budget accountability phase is that the format used from budget preparation to budget authorization to budget execution ceases to be used during budget accountability.

NEP evolves into GAB and the latter morphs into the GAA which in turn is used as budget release document.

But what is supposed to be the seamless progression of using one reference format stops post-implementation because there is no way we will be able to know if a project has been implemented.

Well, there is a way through COA but it is on a per project basis, and digging up reports there is a form of archeology, when what we want is one easy-to-read compendium which an annotated GAA can provide.

Mr. President:

On this innovation I am proposing, I will craft the language of the provision, and I hope that it will merit the support of the reform-driven leadership of the DBM.

I am confident they would, because DBM has always been the incubator of reforms which have made the bureaucracy more dynamic, spending more transparent and have improved how the government does it job.

If it's enthralled with the Open Budgeting concept, then may I remind them that nothing makes the budget more open than using the same GAA as a report card.

Open budgeting also requires the openness to new ideas -- even those emanating from Congress with which the executive has this running battle for control over the public purse.

In the two decades I have been in government, I have witnessed to how these two branches have fought over budgeting turf.

As regularly as Congress makes amendments to the national budget does the executive also routinely veto them.

In some points of our recent past, the executive has stonewalled congressional revisions as if its motto was "No pasaran!" or "It shall not pass."

The joke is that when the budget is returned to the Palace by Congress, the first thing our friends in the executive do is to squeeze it tightly to force some hidden pig to squeal loudly.

But I think we should now push the reset button on legislative-executive budget engagement.

Recent judicial decisions on the use of public money has altered the budgeting landscape. It should also trigger a change on the way we engage each other in drafting the budget.

While checks-and-balance must never cease nor relax, perhaps we can move forward by admitting that we are not rivals for power but are partners for progress.

Well, there are times that you should stand your ground against amendments which are unreasonable, but there are times when you should find common ground with us on those which are reasonable.

I think you have this ingrained suspicion that every amendment Congress makes is akin to pounding plowshares into pork barrel.

Perhaps you should drop your stereotype of us because insofar as the Senate is concerned, amendments are done not to accumulate earmarks but to put more projects on the ground and boost public services.

Besides, you should remember that senators nowadays are elected based on their repugnance of pork and not how they love it.

I have belabored to stress this point because we do intend to make amendments and it would be better to signal our intentions in advance.

When you receive them, view them as improvements which would allow the budget to evolve into a superior tool for national development.

The merits of the amendments can speak for themselves.

It is about putting food on school desks so that malnourished kids will not go to school hungry, it is about putting more money in rehabilitation efforts so that Yolanda victims can finally have homes to go to, it is about increasing crop insurance so that farmers will have something to fall back on when calamity strikes, it is about pouring more funds to keep children out of streets, it is about funding health insurance so it can cover the poor, the aged, and the infirm.

These are made to increase the compassion quotient of the budget. These are changes one can only agree to.

After all, no budget proposal is so perfect that it is exempt from modification. None is shrouded in the cloak of infallibility. And the best budget makers would welcome suggestions, instead of shooting them down on sight.

If amendments are made, it is not an indictment of your shortcomings. Rather, it is our way of improving what you have proposed.

And I am glad to note, Mr. President, that the budget for the current year carried the sentiments of the Senate and it is notable for the fact that for the first time in decades, our amendments were upheld, not vetoed.

Sapagkat ang budget ay hindi isang Facebook post na ang kayang gawin ng Senado ay mag-like lamang.

Thank you, Mr. President.