For ‘quality’, Senate to restudy its EVAT

"Senate to probe EVAT law effect on basic commodities." That STAR headline on Monday must have got readers asking, "What, you mean they didn’t study the tax’s consequence on prices before they passed it last year?"

The question falls on Senate President Frank Drilon’s stock reply to twits that his chamber spends more time on inquiries in aid of reelection than on passing laws. "Quality over quantity," he repeats. By that, he means that the Senate takes more time than the House of Representatives to debate bills, with the end of better versions.

Well, the 13th Senate has passed only four national laws since session started in July 2004. All four came in Nov.-Dec.: the 2005 national budget, attrition of limp revenue officials, higher taxes on tobacco and liquor, and the lifting of old exemptions to the expanded value-added tax. Debates started well before that. One would thus assume that, under Drilon’s quality-over-quantity rule, the Senate dwelt lengthily on how EVAT on fuel, electricity, highway toll, lawyers and doctors would affect the prices of goods. After all, Cabinet men had given calculations. Rep. Joey Salceda, an economic adviser of President Gloria Arroyo, had screamed back then about the inflationary and recessionary effects of a 10-percent tax on gas and power. So did some senators. The Senate had ample time and tables to render a judgment.

This is not to say that the Senate must not take a second look at the EVAT. This is to point out that the quality-over-quantity excuse is baloney.

Sen. Mar Roxas, once trade minister of two Presidents, will head the Senate restudy. He justifies it thus: "Government cannot adopt a business-as-usual stance" amid public fears of price jumps starting Nov. 1, when EVAT takes effect. The economy may have grown in Jun.-Oct. in spite of political squabbling. Trade, energy and finance officials may have set up monitoring teams and complaint desks against price manipulators and for confused consumers. Still, as Roxas notes, no one is not home free: "While government is saying that basic commodities are spared from the new tax, we should not ignore that before goods reach the palengke, they will pass through businesses that are EVAT-able."

Roxas is smart to see the devil in the details. Farm goods like rice or fish may still be exempted from EVAT. But it takes trucks running on diesel through turnpikes – now subject to EVAT – to transport these to market. How much will a 10-percent levy hit old prices, which truckers surely will pass on to consumers? Processed foods like canned meat or skimmed milk have been subject to EVAT for years. But it takes factory electricity – now EVAT-able – to process these. What percentage does electricity – already the costliest in Asia next to Japan – play in manufacturing? These are but two items that Roxas will have to look into again, if only to allay fears of consumer wallets thinning than ever. His oversight team will have to check as well on the executive branch’s readiness to explain EVAT’s input-output mechanism and deal with profiteers who have started to take advantage of the confusion.

Roxas would be smarter, though, to admit if the Senate had not done all these basic studies during the long debate over EVAT. For then, it is not quality over quantity after all. Which is why Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel is urging the Majority to wrap up all the Senate inquiries and render decisions any which way.

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Over at the House, another kind of sloth has set in. It is not of the Senate-type of preferring easy inquiries to painstaking lawmaking. It is of a worse type – that of not attending committee hearings at all.

Congress is on recess Oct. 15-Nov. 7, ten days earlier than originally scheduled to let some senators junket at the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Europe. Notably the House committee on appropriations had agreed to meet during the break to catch up with the 2006 national budget, delayed by two months because of the Arroyo impeachment. Problem is, it cannot conduct business because of no quorum.

The committee’s easing of rules magnifies its absenteeism. Normally it takes a majority of members (50 percent plus 1) to make a quorum. In this body’s case, it takes only 20 percent of the 185 members, or 37, to conduct business. Even then, only half that required low number (16-18) attends. Apparently the 170 or so other members signed up for membership merely for the perks and prestige that go with initiating the yearly national budget.

What does committee chair Rolando Andaya Jr. have to say about it? "They are not school children that need a reminder from me to attend," he laments.

Yet they do act like little truants. As such they must be punished. Why not cut the committee membership down to only one-fifth of its present? That way, even if the quorum is raised to 33 percent from the present 20, it will still have a quorum of that diligent 16-18. And taxpayers will get their money’s worth from their congressmen.

Too, that committee must stop telling the Senate to "mind your own business" whenever reminded of its duties. The Senate has every right to worry about the delayed hearings, for it will bear the brunt of rushing its own sessions to pass a national budget by yearend. Besides, inter-chamber courtesy, that tradition of letting each other do its own thing, went with the election of the present crop of uncouth legislators.

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