The Budget department will likely submit to the 18th Congress the proposed P4.1-trillion national budget for 2020 after the leadership in the House of Representatives is established, Acting Budget Secretary Janet Abuel said Tuesday.
He said the submission might happen once the new Speaker was installed so that “everything is more or less crystallized.”
The new time line is different from what the department said in May, when Abuel said the department was targeting to submit the budget to Congress on the same day that President Rodrigo Duterte delivers his fourth State of the Nation Address this month or one day after it.
“Maybe now we’ll have to wait because we need to have a very close coordination with Congress,” Abuel told reporters.
“We are going to work very fast so that as early as we can, we will be able to submit. It is really important that we know we can work with the leadership.”
When asked on the possibility that the delay in the budget approval might happen again, Abuel said Budget officials were “more positive now.”
“We’re not really fearing but we’re preparing for it just in case. That is why we don’t want to rush, we want to wait… We want also that at least there is a coordination so that the relationship is better and that the proposed budget will be preserved as much as possible,” Abuel said.
Earlier, Abuel said the department was studying if cash-based budgeting could be fully implemented next year.
A cash-based budgeting system limits the contractual obligations and disbursing payments to the goods delivered and the services rendered within the fiscal year. The department earlier said the system promotes fiscal discipline and better planning among agencies in spending or using their resources.
Under the system, an extended payment period of three months after the fiscal year will be provided to give more time to government agencies to pay.
The State of the Nation Address is usually delivered by the President to a joint session of Congress every fourth Monday of July. The SONA serves as a means of informing the nation about the country’s economic, political, and social condition.
This year, the government operated on a reenacted budget in the full first quarter. It was only in April that Duterte finally affixed his signature on the P3.7-trillion national budget for 2019 after a couple of months of impasse between the two houses of Congress.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III had previously said the government must increase its expenditures in the months ahead to achieve an economic growth of more than 6 percent this year.
In 2019, the national government disbursements are targeted to reach P3.774 trillion, equivalent to 19.6 percent of the gross domestic product. That would be 10.7 percent higher than the actual disbursement in 2018.
“For us to achieve this year’s disbursement target, the government must spend a total of P2.996 trillion from the second to fourth quarters of the year,” Dominguez said.
He said infrastructure spending accounted for almost one-third of the amount of disbursements programmed for the quarters. Actual infrastructure disbursements in the first quarter of this year amounted to P207.2 billion.
“To reach our total infrastructure disbursement target of P1 trillion for the entire year, the government must disburse around P792.97 billion for infrastructure from the second to fourth quarters of the year,” Dominguez said.
