Recto confident on passage of 2006 budget

Sen. Ralph Recto remains confident that a new budget will be passed this year despite fears of some sectors that the proposed 2006 allocation will no longer be pursued with the expected passage of a supplemental budget.

Recto said the decision of the Senate committee on finance chaired by Sen. Manuel Villar to recommend the approval of the bill granting a P1,000 salary increase to government workers "should not seal the doom of the 2006 budget."

"My only fear is that by giving life to this bill, it will be the signal for others to kill the mother budget bill," Recto said.

The Senate and some sectors have expressed suspicion that the supplemental bill was introduced to remove pressure on Congress to pass the 2006 General Appropriations Act (GAA).

Since one of the major allocations in the proposed P1.053-trillion budget for 2006 was the wage hike for government workers, pressure has been mounting on Congress to approve the measure for the sake of more than one million state workers.

The year 2005 ended without passing the new GAA, so the earlier budget had to be reenacted.

With delays in the passage of the 2006 GAA, the national government has been working on details of the reenacted budget for two months now.

House delays in passing the measure have prompted the Senate to suspect that lawmakers do not want a new budget.

But House committee on appropriations chairman Albay Rep. Jose Salceda has given assurances that the budget would be transmitted to the Senate by the third week of March and enacted before Congress goes on Lenten break on April 7.

Recto said he believes the commitments made by Salceda.

"But I take a kinder view. I think the House will still pass the budget... I don’t think they are simulating hearings for appearances’ sake," he said.

Without a new budget, Recto said the public will be denied of the "refund and rebate in terms of new projects and programs" they are entitled to get as a result of improved revenue collections.

"The right to collect taxes from the people comes with the duty to spend it for things the people badly need," he said.

"Under a reenacted budget, the people’s loss will be the Palace’s gain," he added.

Meanwhile, Recto said that the P1,000 wage hike for national government workers must also apply to local government employees.

"When we say across-the-board (wage increase), it should also mean across-the-bureaucracy. After all, local government employees are not poor cousins of those working in national government agencies," he said.

Recto noted that there are currently about 400,000 local government employees while the National Government has 1.1 million on its payroll.

According to Recto, there is a provision in the counterpart bill of the House measure that grants local government units the authority to provide additional allowances to its employees.

He explained that the funds for the salary hike for local government employees could be drawn from the internal revenue allotments of each local government unit and its other locally generated income. — Marvin Sy