MANILA, Philippines - The Supreme Court (SC) is seeking an additional P5.1-billion funding for 2016 on top of the P5.6-billion budget increase that President Aquino has proposed for the judiciary.
The SC proposal is contained in a letter sent to Cagayan de Oro City Rep. Rufus Rodriguez, who sits in the House of Representatives appropriations committee, by Deputy Court Administrator Raul Villanueva, who heads the 2016 judiciary budget committee.
Rodriguez has forwarded the SC communication to Davao City Rep. Isidro Ungab, appropriations committee chairman and head of a panel tasked to process proposed amendments to the 2016 budget that the House approved last Friday.
If the House approves the SC request, it would increase the judiciary budget for next year to nearly P32 billion.
In the President’s 2016 budget proposal, the judiciary was allocated P26.675 billion, up by P5.629 billion or 26.7 percent from this year’s P21.046 billion.
Of the P5.1-billion additional funding that the SC is seeking, P4.651 billion would be for the high court and lower courts, P398.8 million for the Court of Appeals (CA), P32.5 million for the Sandiganbayan and P15.7 million for the Court of Tax Appeals (CTA).
The increase would be appropriated for the procurement of furniture, office equipment, laptops, computers, printers and software, and payment of benefits for retiring justices, judges and other personnel, and surviving spouses of dead retirees.
Some P292.5 million would be allocated for a five-story building for the CA and P6 million for the purchase of a shuttle bus for employees of the CTA.
Aquino has proposed a higher budget for the judiciary for 2016 despite losing the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) and Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) cases in the SC.
The SC declared parts of the DAP economic stimulus program as unconstitutional last year. Before that, in November 2013, the tribunal struck down the P25-billion annual PDAF as unconstitutional.
PDAF was the congressional pork barrel. It allocated P200 million a year for each senator and P70 million for each member of the House of Representatives.
Sens. Juan Ponce Enrile, Ramon Revilla Jr. and Jinggoy Estrada are facing plunder and graft cases before the Sandiganbayan for allegedly receiving hundreds of millions in kickbacks for the supposed misuse of their PDAF allocations from 2007 to 2009.
Charged with them are alleged pork barrel scam mastermind Janet Lim-Napoles, the senators’ senior aides and key officers of four government corporations that served as conduits of the PDAF allocations of Enrile, Revilla and Estrada.
Similar charges have been filed by the Department of Justice against a fourth senator, Gregorio Honasan, with the Office of the Ombudsman.
Under the President’s budget proposal, funding for the SC and lower courts increased by P5.471 billion, from P18.791 billion to P24.262 billion; for the Sandiganbayan, from P412 million to P506 million or by P94 million; for the CA, from P1.496 billion to P1.535 billion or by P39 million; and for the CTA, from P256 million to P282 million or by P26 million.
The appropriation for the Presidential Electoral Tribunal (PET), which is the SC itself, remained the same as this year at P91 million. The 15 justices of the high court receive about P1 million a year in allowances as PET members.
Allocations for salaries for the entire judiciary went up from P15.831 billion to P18.151 billion, or by P2.320 billion (14.7 percent); while funds for maintenance and other operating expenses increased from P4.064 billion to P5.370 billion, or by P1.306 billion (32.1 percent).