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COMELEC SAYS P21 BILLION NEEDED FOR COUNTING MACHINES

Isabela gov’t eyes UN hand polls in 2009 budget

By Angie M. Rosales

10/03/2008

Will there be elections in 2010? And if there will be, will this be automated?

Automation of the 2010 elections remained in doubt yesterday as the P21 billion needed to pave the way for its implementation was not included in next year’s P1.43 trillion budget submitted by Malacañang to Congress.

A supplemental budget for the amount, meanwhile, is expected to face rough sailing as Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago, an ally of President Arroyo, expressed reservations in giving the Commission on Elections (Comelec) the additional fund, saying it is far “too expensive.”

Comelec said the amount was needed to prepare the country for computerized polls for 2010 when the country votes for a new president and national and local officials. The fund would be used primarily for the acquisition of direct recording electronic (DRE) or counting machines.

Senators looking over the Comelec’s proposed P5.5-billion budget for 2009 also noted unliquidated cash advances reported by the Commission on Audit (CoA) are already equivalent to their proposed appropriation.

On top of this, senators sitting in the finance sub-committee B headed by

Defensor-Santiago, was told the P1 billion expenses incurred in the botched Mega Pacific Consortium contract for the acquisition of automated counting machines several years ago, was yet to be refunded to the poll body.

With all these revelations, Santiago expressed reservations in approving the called supplemental budget of the Comelec, saying that “P21 billion is just too expensive for a developing country.”

“There are some countries where even in a manual system of voting, the election results have been very speedy and have remained credible,” she said.

“We have to hear from the budget secretary because they have an order of priority when they draw up the budget for a fiscal year. The amount is very hefty. You have to cut a lot of personal services, maintenance and other operating expenses, and capital outlay from the budgets of other agencies. That’s the problem with adding to the budget, you have to deduct it from some other agencies,” she said in an interview with reporters.

Sen. Richard Gordon, who is the Senate sponsor of the poll automation law, however, vowed to rally behind the approval of the additional allocation for the Comelec, noting the immediate need for the availability of the funds in time for the elections.

Comelec chairman Jose Melo told the panel Comelec has already sent a formal request to Malacañang, both to President Arroyo and Budget Secretary Rolando Andaya, last Monday for the supplemental budget, after noting its exclusion in the 2009 general appropriations bill.

Melo, in a separate interview with reporters after proceedings, said so far, Malacañang appears to be “very positive and very receptive” in the supplemental budget they are asking.

As for the cash advances that remain unsettled, Melo said this dates back to 1984 and fortunately, they managed to identify those that accumulated such amount.

They happen to be the so-called support group composed of members of the military, police force and teachers deputized by the Comelec during elections who were provided with lump sum appropriations for their allowances.

“We will ask the Ombudsman to prosecute these people.,” he said.

Comelec Commissioner Nicodemo Ferrer admitted that they have yet to retrieve the P1 billion from Mega Pacific despite repeated demands made by the Office of the Ombudsman.

“Instead of responding positively, they filed a case against the Comelec to collect from the alleged unpaid balance. So we have a counter claim. So our move now is to file a motion for summary judgment attaching to that motion, the final and executory the decision of the Supreme court, directing the Mega Pacific and its stockholders to return, to refund to the Comelec the amount that we have paid and for this Mega Pacific to get back their automated machines, because it is theirs,” he said.

With Congress now deliberating on the 2009 national budget, an administration lawmaker said the country is in the right position at the right time to at least mitigate the domestic effect of the global financial meltdown.

In his sponsorship speech yesterday on the proposed 2009 General Appropriations Act (GAA), Rep. Edcel Lagman said that while no country in the world could escape the ill-effects of the triple whammy of “the continuing escalation of the prices of food and other basic commodities, the fluctuating price of fuel at high levels and the Wall Street financial market fiasco,” the government could ease up its impact by coming up with buffer and safety nets, insinuating the administration should amend the proposed 2009 budget.

The House committee on appropriations, however, indicated the proposed P1.41-trillion national budget for 2009 will not likely be returned to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) for reassessment in view of the positive changes in the global economic climate.

“I don’t think that (reassessment) is necessary assuming that after one or two weeks, the scenario has completely changed,” said House appropriations committee chair Junie Cua during plenary deliberations on the proposed measure.

“While we do not cause these upheavals, neither can we offer redress,” the Albay lawmaker pointed out. “Our role is limited to mitigating the adverse effects of these crises to shield our people, particularly the marginalized and disadvantaged. We can only offer buffers and safety nets.”

Lagman said the country is fortunate that Congress is still in the process crafting and formulating the GAA, adding that it must be formulated “as a proactive response on behalf of our people and our institutions, without being bound to a rigid calendar requiring the GAA’s approval with undue alacrity and haste.”

The former chairman of the House committee on appropriations said it was understandable that the budget was proposed and submitted the way it is considering it was drafted by the Executive Department before the financial crisis in the United Sates broke out.

“(But) when the alarming, even crippling, developments in the US financial market started to unfold on Sept. 15, 2008, the country’s economic advisers in the Development Budget Coordinating Committee (DBCC), namely – the Budget Secretary, the Finance Secretary and the Neda Director-General together with the Governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) had already briefed the Committee on Appropriations 12 days earlier, regarding the macroeconomic assumptions and parameters of the proposed National Expenditure Program for 2009,” said Lagman.

In response to the triple “F” crisis on food, fuel and the financial market, Lagman reiterated the country cannot “be bailed out from the economic doldrums if we are unable to successfully confront and solve two ballooning problems: the inordinately huge debt service which devours an enormous portion of the annual budget, and a rapidly growing population which virtually makes the yearly appropriations meaningless because of the multitude of beneficiaries sharing finite resources.”

In that regard, Lagman recommended a special provision which was also contained in the 2008 General Appropriations Act prohibiting the Executive from paying the interests for fraudulent, wasteful and/or odious loans, citing specifically the issues of the Austrian loan on medical waste incinerators which have been found indubitably as substandard from the very start and whose utilization has been subsequently banned under the Clean Air Act.

“We must even extend the injunction to the payment of principal amortizations for such loans,” he said.

Lagman also took a dig at debt servicing of the country’s foreign debt as outlaid in the President’s 2009 National Expenditure Program alloting P111.543 billion, while the off-budget payment through automatic appropriation for principal amortizations on foreign loans amounts to P88.835 billion, or a combined total of P200.378 billion, which is 14.16 percent of the P1.415 trillion proposed annual budget and P12.660 billion more than this year’s total outlay.

Lagman claimed the problem of the Philippine government in responding to crisis situations is made extremely arduous, complicated and compounded because of a burgeoning population of 88.4 million Filipinos today.

“We are obligated to serve and save the teeming multitude so much so that the per capita budgetary support for each Filipino becomes grossly minimal. If we divide the total productive budget of P646.595 billion by 88.4 million Filipinos, the annual per capita budgetary allocation is P7,314.42 annually or a miniscule P20.04 daily per Filipino. This cannot even buy the cheapest kilo of NFA rice or much more a liter of diesel.”

“Verily, the Congress of the Philippines, more particularly the House of Representatives, must directly confront and adequately address in the General Appropriations Bill the twin problems of a huge debt service and an expanding population as positive and clear responses to the triple “F” crises on food, fuel and the financial market,” he stressed.

To mitigate the impact of the triple “F” on the country, Lagman proposed House leadership and the Committee on Appropriations “consider very seriously transforming the House of Representatives into a Committee of the Whole so that Members of this Chamber can directly ask searching questions to the country’s economic managers and secure from them the necessary and relevant information and empirically-based projections.”

“This process assures that the General Appropriations Bill would be truly responsive to and supportive of our people’s needs and interests in this critical time,” he pointed out.

Lagman’s proposal to transform the House into a committee of the whole for that particular purpose was welcomed by an opposition lawmaker, Bayan Muna partylist Rep. Teddy Casiòo.

Lagman also urged his colleagues to mold the budget measure in “the furnace of confrontation and debate because this House is a deliberative assembly.”

“We must, however, not hold it hostage to irrelevant interpellations, dilatory maneuvers, vain grandstanding and myopic parochial concerns,” he stressed. “We must not hesitate to cut to the bone overstated budget proposals. We must reduce allocations which are not implementable during the incoming fiscal year. We must not reward non-performing agencies and those whose absorptive capacities are below par,” he said.

The US Senate passed the bailout plan Thursday (Manila time) after sweetening it with tax breaks.

The Quirino congressman said that if the economic turmoil subsides within the next few days, the current proposed budget “would be a budget worth defending.”

It will be recalled that Lagman called for budget cuts on poorly-performing government agencies in order to prioritize infrastructure and social services amid the global financial crisis.

“We must not hesitate to cut to the bone overstated budget proposals. We must reduce allocations which are not implementable during the incoming fiscal year. We must not reward non-performing agencies and those whose absorptive capacities are below par,” said Lagman in his speech during the House plenary deliberations on the proposed 2009 national budget.

“Only by doing these can we create a pool of resources which we can realign to augment further basic services and infrastructure development,” he added.

Lagman, who relinquished his post as appropriations committee chair to Cua in late August to honor their term-sharing agreement, also called on the House leadership and the appropriations committee to transform the House into a committee of the whole so that all lawmakers can directly ask the economic managers “necessary and relevant information and empirically-based projections” on the current economic situation.

He stressed the proposed national budget for 2009 must be revised because the global financial crisis that followed the meltdown of the US economy in had not yet been taken into consideration when the Office of the President transmitted the proposed budget to the House of Representatives last August 26.

Charlie V. Manalo