Like it or not, DBM has to be the guardrail for the honest use of funds allocated for large projects – especially public works projects – included in the NEP.
Over the years, I have watched with increasing dismay and frustration as the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) – the Budget Commission in times past –figured in major scandals involving the Executive Department and Congress.
The most notorious of those scandals have been the Priority Development Assistant Fund (PDAF) kickback payments to certain Senators and Representatives – the transactions arranged by Janet Lim-Napoles – and the unlawful transfer to DBM of P42 billion worth of funds allocated to the Department of Health. And there have been other less celebrated scandals involving the DBM.
Currently, DBM is once again in the limelight on account of the what is more appropriately called the uncontrolled-flooding mess. The explanation for this, of course, is the fact that DBM was, as mandated by law, the source of the payments made to the erring contractors. All the entities that contracted with the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) for the delivery of completed flood control projects were paid with checks bearing the signature of Secretary of Budget and Management Amenah Pangandaman.
Secretary Pangandaman was invited by, and has appeared before, Congressional committees to provide information on DBM’s role in the process of governmental procurement of flood control services from private contractors. The DBM head’s testimony was totally unsatisfactory. In essence, Secretary Pangandaman said that DBM was totally free of blame for by far the worst scandal in the history of the Philippine government.
Secretary Pangandaman told the members of the Senate and House of Representatives committee (1) that it is not the DBM’s statutory obligation to review documents supporting private contractors’ requests for payment (“That’s not our job”, Secretary Pangandaman said”), (2) that DBM lacks the physical capability to go over the thousands of projects listed in the 700 pages of the National Expenditure Program (NEP) and (3) that DBM considers its job done when it releases the contract prices to the contractors.
The DBM head’s position on the role and responsibility of her department may be summed up as follows: DBM is simply a releaser of payments to claimants who are able to support their claims for payment with complete supporting documents. It is no concern of DBM that a contractor is awarded billions of pesos’ worth of government contracts on a meager capital base, or that the same names keep appearing in lists of winning bidders have more or less identical boards of directors or that payments are made to contracts undertaking projects in provinces and cities that don’t need them. Once we have processed the claim documents and released the payments, our job is done.
This view of the role of DBM in the economic scheme of things is wrong and unacceptable. If it is not corrected, the word ‘Management’ might as well be dropped and DBM might as well be renamed, simply, Department of the Budget. After all, Secretary Pangandaman appears to not regard the national budget as something that needs to be managed.
Like it or not, DBM has to be the guardrail for the honest use of funds allocated for large projects – especially public works projects – included in the NEP. There is no other government institution that can be expected to act as a guardrail. The insertion into the NEP of flawed and ghost projects by certain. Representatives and Senators and their doubling as contractors is the source of the problem. Nor, because what it conducts are after-the-event audits, can the Commission on Audit (COA) be expected to be a guardrail.
Secretary Pangandaman says that DBM cannot be expected to check on the integrity of the contractors and the uncorruptness of their project proposals because the NEP has too many pages and contains too many proposals. But the job has to be done if the mis-expenditures of many more billions of Taxpayers’ money is to be avoided in the coming days.
I have unsolicited advice for the DBM head. Restructure your department so that there will be a division or section in DBM – call it the Budget Review Section – whose specific assignment will be to go over the projects for which payments are being prepared. And get help from outside DBM, especially from the private accounting professions. You will need an additional appropriation for this. Add that amount to your department’s annual budget request. Whatever that additional amount will surely be minuscule in comparison with the billions of taxpayers’ money lost to contractors who fool the Filipino people with sub standardly implemented or non-existent projects.
Secretary Pangandaman, you cannot just throw your hands up in the air and say that DBM cannot do the job of reviewing projects. That is unacceptable.
In sum, the role, authority and structure of DBM needs re-examination.
(llagasjessa@yahoo.com)
