MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) should scrap the corruption-prone “allocable” system and adopt the bottom-up budgeting framework to better allocate infrastructure funding to all the regions and congressional districts, an anti-crime and corruption group said yesterday.
Apple Meneses, IBMI or Ipabitag Mo executive director, said the bottom-up budgeting method introduced during the time of former president Benigno Aquino III and his then budget secretary Florencio Abad could be the basis of a formula that could be implemented at the DPWH to do away with the highly irregular and graft-prone system enforced by previous DPWH officials that involved lawmakers in identifying infrastructure projects to be funded by the government.
Meneses said under the bottom-up budgeting framework, the DPWH would seek to involve communities in identifying the infrastructure projects that the DPWH should consider for priority funding under the National Expenditure Program.
Under the bottom-up budgeting policy, the DPWH has to involve the community, the community leaders, the barangay, the municipal or city local government units as well as the non-government organizations including fisherfolk and farmers’ associations in identifying the infrastructure projects that are much needed by the community and so should be prioritized by the DPWH for funding, Meneses elaborated.
“Under the bottom-up budgeting system, communities will be directly involved in identifying or proposing infrastructure projects. It will not be the congressman or a senator who will submit proposals or a wishlist of projects,” Meneses said.
In a press conference last Friday, IBMI called on the Senate and Congress to pass the legislation of a policy implementing and institutionalizing the bottom-up budgeting system.
Anti-crime and corruption advocate Ben Tulfo, IBMI adviser and chairman emeritus, said that there was a need for an implementing law institutionalizing bottom-up budgeting in the national government and all its agencies and departments to make sure that the ghost flood control scam and congressional insertions in the budget will not happen again.
“We have to institutionalize it or this can really happen again. Right now, everybody is watching the DPWH, the DSWD (Department of Social Welfare and Development), and we hear officials wanting to implement a version of what is really a bottom-up budgeting system. But when all this dies down after so many months or years, corrupt officials will surely try again,” Tulfo said.
“It is not enough to implement it. we have to institutionalize it,” Tulfo said. “That’s why the terms just change – pork barrel, PDAF (priority development assistance fund), DAP (distribution acceleration program), ‘soft pork,’ amendment, insertion, and the latest is ‘wishlist.’ It’s still grand larceny of public funds, plain and simple. It just comes back under a new name, a new term. We have to put a stop to it now and in the future… and we do that by institutionalizing a system that can do that effectively,” Tulfo told The STAR.
Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon, in a press conference at the DPWH central office in Manila last Jan. 12, said that they were formulating a system to replace the “allocable” system of the late undersecretary Ma. Catalina Cabral in allocating infrastructure funds and identifying projects to be funded by the DPWH budget.
Dizon said that DPWH Undersecretary for planning, lawyer Nick Conti, was set to finish the formula in a week, and they will present it to the public once finished.