Amend road users' tax law, says Enrile

MANILA, Philippines - Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile wants the law that created the Road User’s Tax amended in a bid to stop its unauthorized use and allow its utilization for other vital projects.

Enrile said the estimated P10 billion earned annually from the road user’s tax should be used not only for road construction or repair but also for the acquisition of communications equipment, funding irrigation or fisheries projects, or as loans to families affected by typhoons. The funds may also be tapped for construction of buildings. 

He noted that even in his home province of Cagayan, good roads are inexplicably made to undergo repair or are destroyed altogether to make way for new ones. The same practice is common even in Metro Manila.

“For me this is wasteful, that is why I am suggesting to the members of the Aquino cabinet whom I’ve talked to (that) perhaps the better thing is for road user’s tax to be amended. There should be a special fund allotted only to construct roads or to service loans. That would open new roads for the country, major roads,” Enrile said.

Last month, Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago asked Enrile and Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr. to ensure that the road user’s tax is deposited in the national treasury and included in the appropriations for 2011.

“Until the recent past, the fund was deposited directly with the Department of Public Works and Highways, and released by the Road Fund Board without congressional scrutiny. As I pointed out in a privilege speech late last year, that anomalous procedure provided occasion for freewheeling plunder of the P60-billion Road Fund from the road user’s tax,” Santiago said in her letter to the two Congress leaders.

In a privilege speech last year, Santiago recommended the filing of plunder charges against former public works secretary Hermogenes Ebdane and former Road Board executive director Rodolfo Puno for their alleged involvement in the misuse of the road user’s tax.

Santiago said Congress had never exercised oversight over the road fund, which had ballooned to P60.5 billion by 2009 from the time it was first collected in 2001.

Santiago said Congress’ judicious exercise of its powers would “save a grateful nation from continued plunder by faceless bureaucrats, who are now under criminal investigation by the Ombudsman.”