Although the proposed national budget is almost fully itemized, there is however no document which shows if indeed the itemized projects have been completed, Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto said today.

Recto said that for all the voluminous budget documents that the Palace is sending “by the truckloads” to Congress every year, “they lack one important document : and that is a report if the projects and programs funded by last year’s budget have been implemented.”

“We are in receipt of seven documents, more than one foot thick, almost 11 kilos in weight, containing 5,020 pages of fine print, but you can go through all of them line by line and you won’t find anything which says that the projects lovingly enumerated in the previous year’s budget have been implemented,” Recto said.

“My question is: 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?” Recto said.

Recto said what could be included among the traditional budget documents sent to Congress is a “new budget accountability form” showing if a project, activity or program authorized in the General Appropriations Act (GAA) had indeed been implemented.

He is proposing the use of the same GAA format in reporting that the projects funded for the year have indeed been implemented. “Ang gusto natin ay parang resibo ng paggasta.”

“The idea is for the executive to return to us the same GAA but this time it will be in annotated form. Every funding item in the GAA of the previous year will carry a corresponding note indicating when it was completed and the amount spent for its completion,” Recto said.

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

“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 superimpose in that GAA a note stating the actual number of policemen and teachers hired,” Recto added.

“Sa post-implementation, GAA format pa rin ang gagamitin, pero modified na, kasi nakasaad na doon kung ang proyektong ito ay naimplement nga ba o hindi,” Recto said.

“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 “fully implemented” and that would already suffice,” Recto said.

“Sa madaling sabi, gusto nating ang GAA ang s’ya ring magsilbi bilang checklist kung natupad nga ba ang nakasaad dito,” Recto explained.

“The beauty of this approach 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 pumunta.” Recto said.

“Makikita rin kung ang pera para sa airport ay na-convert into savings. O kung ang pera para sa DepEd ay na divert kung saan-saan,” he said.

Recto noted “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.”

The reason for this is that the familiar budgeting format used during “budget authorization” and “budget execution” ceased to be used during the “budget accountability” phase, Recto explained.

The first phase is “budget preparation” when details of next year’s spending are hammered out in the executive and collated in the National Expenditure Program (NEP) or the President’s Budget.

The NEP later evolves into the general appropriations bill which in turn becomes the General Appropriations Act.

“The problem is that what should have been a seamless progression of the budgeting process is interrupted in the accountability phase because there is no feedback as to the status of the projects, programs and activities sought to be funded,” he said.

“Kung meron man, mahirap ma-flesh out. Pero kung GAA pa rin ang format mas madali,” he said.

Recto said that the Commission on Audit need not make the status report. “The Department of Budget and Management, whose recent radical reforms allow it to keep tab of each and every project, can render the report,” he said.