One ingredient is missing from the national-budget making process, an ingredient that would give Congress access to the real facts and figures underlying the spending decisions of government departments, agencies and corporation. I am referring to a Freedom of Information Act.
In the last few months, the Filipino people have been observing Congress go through the exercise of putting together the General Appropriations Act (GAA), better known as the national budget. Congressional committees have been holding hearings at which heads of Cabinet departments, Constitutional bodies, bureau and government-owned or controlled corporations (GOCCs) present for scrutiny their institutions’ spending programs for the succeeding fiscal year.
The officials have been justifying their institutions’ budgetary requests with figures and facts that purportedly portray their institutions’ operations during the ending year. The representatives and the senators go over the proffered figures and, on the basis of their judgements as to the figures’ veracity, approve or disapprove, in toto or partially, the budgetary requests.
Economists are firm in stating that the annual GAA is the most important document in a country’s economic development, and that the process of scrutinizing a proposed national budget is the single most important function of a member of Congress. Yet, abundant experience and empirical evidence have shown Filipinos that national-budget making in this country is a process that does not produce the best result, viz; the allocation of government resources to highest-economic-value expenditures.
Corruption is, of course, the worst of the bad features of this country’s government budgetary system. Project-cost padding takes a heavy toll on the National Expenditure Program (NEP). Duplicated projects, projects that have previously received budget allocations –this is particularly true of farm-to-market roads—and ghost projects further reduce the GAA’s capacity to advance the nation’s economic agenda.
The management and use of the government’s budgetary resources are the shared responsibility of three instrumentalities. Congress, as the Constitutional Keeper of the purse, approves the Executive Department’s spending program; the Cabinet-level Department of Budget and Management (DBM) manages the release of expenditures items approved by Congress; and the Commission on Audit (COA), a Constitutional body, audits government expenditures, issuing notices of disallowance (NDs) in instances involving illegal or unauthorized use of government resources. COA has been doing a consistently good job; the same cannot be said of DBM, which is heavily exposed to political pressure.
In the best of situations, Congress, DBM and COA coordinate their approval, releasing and audit operations more closely than they do at present. After all, what is the value of a good COA report if, to borrow a popular phrase, the horse has already left the barn? Monitoring the progress of DBM-released funds prevents misuse of the kind that the Filipino people saw recently in the case of the Office of the Vice-President of the Philippines.
In its effort to ensure the highest-value use of government budgetary resources, Congress has had the benefit of first-rate professional help – including expertise from academe – and state-of-the-art technological assistance. But one ingredient is missing from the national-budget making process, an ingredient that would give Congress access to the real facts and figures underlying the spending decisions of government departments, agencies and corporation. I am referring to a Freedom of Information Act.
Bills seeking the passage of an honest-to-goodness Freedom of Information Act – not the diluted version approved by the Ombudsman – have been filed in Congress in the last three decades. Why not one of them has gone beyond first reading is not hard to understand. Much information that is damaging to the personal interests of many legislators would be unearthed and publicized under a Freedom of Information Act.
A Freedom of Information Act would be a perfect companion for good national-budget making. Let this piece of legislation be finally approved in the next session of the present Congress.
