The proposed 2020 national budget must comply with the Road Board abolition law, which requires all projects funded by motor registration fees be specified in the annual General Appropriations Act (GAA). 

Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto reminded the executive to make sure that next year’s spending bill will be in accordance with Republic Act 11239, which President Duterte signed on April 8, 2019. 

RA 11239 abolished the Road Board and decreed that all Motor Vehicle User’s Charge (MVUC) collections be remitted to the National Treasury and placed in a special account in the General Fund. 

Monies under the account will be “earmarked solely for the construction, upgrading, repair, and rehabilitation of roads, bridges, and road drainage to be included in the annual GAA,” states the said law.

“This is the very important sunshine provision in the law abolishing the Road Board. It means that projects funded by MVUC must be itemized and presented, in the interest of transparency, as MVUC-funded projects,” he said. 

“That’s the way to do it. Full disclosure. So that vehicle owners will know where the registration fees they have paid will go,” Recto said. 

He said if MVUC-funded projects are comingled with other items in the DPWH budget, and the projects they are supposed to finance are lumped together with other items, “then the intent of making them distinct and separate is disobeyed,” he stressed. 

“Kailangan under one box talaga, para alam ng taxpayers kung magkano ang nakolekta, saan gagastusin, at kung ang mga ito ay ayon sa menu na isinasaad sa RA 11239,” Recto explained. 

“If this will not be done, then we will be going back to the old system of treating MVUC collections as off-budget expenditures. Kung hindi deklarado, nakatago at naka-lump sum lang, e di parang bumalik tayo sa lumang gawain,” Recto said.

Unspent MVUC collections stood at P46.25 billion as of late last year. For 2019, government projects to raise P13.9 billion from vehicle registration fees, which are collected by Land Transportation Office.

Malacañang reportedly plans to submit to Congress its proposed P4.2 trillion national budget for 2020 within a week after the President’s State of the Nation Address on July 22. 

Around P1.1 trillion of the fourth national budget the Duterte administration will be proposing will fund infrastructure and other capital outlays.