What happened to last year’s budget?

Now that the Senate is deliberating on the budget for next year, an appropriate question to line departments is simply this: what happened to last year’s budget? Were the projects for which money was allocated accomplished?

It would be interesting to see how cabinet members like DOTC Sec. Jun Abaya will answer that question. I am sure they spent money for salaries, benefits, travel, training and such stuff and in the case of some government agencies, coffee and chocolates for the staff.

But… what about the new airports? Or the rehabilitation of existing ones? What about the toilets… yes, the toilets so sorely needed in airports, ports and other public places under DOTC that they wanted to have one mega contract for?

Indeed, Sen. Serge Osmena asked about the long awaited rehabilitation of NAIA 1 when the DOTC budget was presented. The budget for that was provided three years ago but we have yet to see the project completed. It should be embarrassing for Sec. Jun Abaya if a senator went down the list of DOTC projects funded through the years that are still undone… or not even started.

Luckily for Sec. Jun, that’s not how budget hearings are done. Based on what I have seen in my past coverage of Congress, our legislators don’t really go into details. In fact, I would be very surprised if they knew what they are discussing and approving.

The national budget package is a humongous book. This year’s version is supposedly 5,947 pages. And thick as it may be, it doesn’t give an idea of what happened to funds appropriated in the previous year. This is why Senate President Pro-Tempore Ralph Recto is calling for what he calls “a rear view mirror” on the national budget.

“You can go through the almost 6,000 pages line by line but you won’t find anything which says that the projects lovingly enumerated in the previous year’s budget have been completed,” Recto complained.

“Wade through the thicket of numbers and there’s nothing there which says if 61,510 teachers were indeed hired last year, if the plan to recruit 9,000 pushed through, if the roads catalogued in the DPWH budget were indeed built,” Recto said.

Sen. Recto wants more accountability and so do we. He wants annotations showing line-by-line if the projects were implemented. “If a line-item in the 2015 GAA says that P100 million is appropriated for this road in Cebu, then what we want is for the government to submit in 2016 the same GAA with a status report opposite the said 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 later indicate in that GAA a note stating the actual number of policemen and teachers hired,” he added.

The senator has a good point. We need to have more transparent budgeting. We need to know if pork barrel funds are still in the budget proposal masquerading as something else. It is so easy to lose the details in a national budget that is now in the trillions of pesos.

It is common practice for both the legislative and executive branches to just propose large sums in the budget with no intention of carrying out the project. Near the end of the year, the unspent allocations are converted into “savings” and become pork barrel funds spent at their discretion, including staff bonuses. We need to know every time this happens.

Yes, we need an easy-to-understand report card and that should not be too difficult to do with the help of technology. The way they are doing things now, I suspect that when legislators vote to approve the National Appropriations Act, they are like all of us who use the Internet who just click “I Agree” to a website without reading or understanding the details of what we are agreeing to.

If an administration that claims to be adhering to Daang Matuwid cannot implement greater transparency in budget making, our situation is hopeless. Corruption thrives in confusion and nothing is easier to confuse people with than numbers representing large sums of money.

Hopefully Sen. Recto’s suggestion is taken seriously. At the very least we need a report card based on this year’s budget to know how effective our bureaucrats have been. The thing is, I doubt they will want to do that at all.

VTP

I knew he had been having health issues. But at 89, who doesn’t? And the last time I saw him, he still was the same man who cared a lot about our country and did what he had to do to improve the nation’s prospects.

Former Sen. Vicente T. Paterno was my boss at PNOC. I had the honor of working directly under his supervision, even if just for a short while, after EDSA 1. He had to run for the Senate and help fix a country at a time when our hopes were high for better days.

There were many things that differentiated him from most of our country’s leaders. The most important was integrity. The other thing was his genuine concern for people as if every one of us were part of his family. He was intelligent and a good mentor. He was the epitome of that thing Jesuits call a man for others. He walked his talk.

Ting Paterno was the model public servant in the sense that he had shown how to handle government agencies like DPWH that’s notorious for corruption, yet keeping himself untainted while being able to deliver. If only Mar Roxas studied how Ting Paterno did it, he would have been a success at DOTC, be a good presidential bet in 2016 and not leave us in despair as we are today. Boss Ting showed a public servant can be both honest and effective.

It is unfortunate for our country to have lost someone like Ting Paterno at this time without someone like him in the wings ready to pick up from where he has left us. I am going to miss my old boss, VTP. He was one of a kind… the kind we should have more of instead of the clowns who masquerade as our leaders today.

Quality education

I received this reaction to a column last week from Jun Berba, a retired former top official of Westinghouse and a respected leader of the business community.

Boo - Every time I read your column and I find something really of national importance I feel the urge to write you and thank you. Today’s article is an excellent endorsement to push for better quality education , both from government and public sectors. I myself am a product of the public school system … Burgos Elementary, Mapa High and UP.

Let me complement your article by telling you about the Philippine Foundation for Science and Technology ( PFST ), a private initiative without government funding support. We depend on private sector help and encourage them to incorporate their help into their CSR programs.

We operate the Philippine Science Centrum currently located at Riverbanks in Marikina. It has 150 interactive science exhibits visited by 60,000-70,000 elementary and high school students and teachers annually.

In addition we have so far five Traveling Interactive Science Centrums (different themes) with 40 modules each (we are getting sponsors for additional sets) which travel around the country. We have been to about 180 cities, municipalities and schools from Luzon to Mindanao. About 450,000 students and teachers visit these Traveling Centrums annually. Since they cannot come to Metro Manila, we go to them.

In addition, every year we conduct about four three-day Teachers Camps in different parts in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao to help teachers improve their teaching competence in Science subjects. Over the years (we celebrate this year PFST’s 30th year) our exhibits have been visited by over 6,000,000 students and teachers.

Our founder is former DOST Secretary Ceferino Follosco. Among our advisers are former Prime Minister Cesar Virata, former Ambassador to UK and DTI Secretary Cesar Bautista and a few more leading personalities in academe and business.  Meneleo (Ito) Carlos of Resins, Inc. is our Chairman and I am the President.

I hope you can help us with our initiatives by convincing more business leaders to help us develop a “ CRITICAL MASS “ of young  people who will go into science related careers. They can make it part of their annual CSR.

Our rough survey among students visiting our exhibits shows that 67 percent respond that they would like to take up a science course after high school. We need to catch up with our ASEAN neighbors who have focused on SCIENCE EDUCATION for their planning for the future.

Best regards.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco