City’s barangay budget crisis was never just about late paperwork

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Every barangay captain in Iloilo City has, at some point, heard some version of the same lecture: submit the budget on time, or the whole village runs on fumes for a year. That threat is not hypothetical anymore. As of July 20, 63 of the city’s 180 barangays and 107 Sangguniang Kabataan councils were still operating without an approved 2026 budget, more than halfway through the fiscal year. Under a reenacted budget, there are no new programs, no capital projects, and no salary increases, just the bare minimum needed to keep the lights on.

For months, the story around city hall was that barangay officials simply could not get their paperwork in on time. The city council’s own joint committee investigation, released this week, tells a messier and more honest story. The crisis, the report says, is “not merely a problem of delayed submission.” It traces back to gaps in planning, technical capacity, records custody, and staff turnover – and, uncomfortably, to accountability at the city level, too.

Some of the specifics are almost absurd. Certain barangays have handed their budget and financial paperwork over to private contractors, who in some cases still hold the actual PhilGEPS accounts, checks, and passbooks. A barangay captain, elected by actual voters, does not necessarily control the account where the barangay’s own money sits. The committee flagged this as a “serious concern,” which feels like an understatement.

Give the council some credit, though, because this is not nothing. Back in February, only 12 barangays and two Sangguniang Kabataan councils had approved budgets, a shortfall Councilor Rex Marcus Sarabia, the council’s majority floor leader, called part of “the worst kind of budgetary crisis,” one where taxpayers’ money never quite makes it back down to where people actually feel it. Climbing to 117 approved budgets by July is real movement. It is also, worth saying plainly, not enough for a system meant to serve people now, not eventually.

The proposed fix, a Barangay-SK Budgetary Reform Ordinance built around a Barangay Academy for coaching and simplified planning templates, sounds sensible on paper. It also sounds a lot like the last fix, and the one before that, going back to a technical committee formed under the previous administration. Training helps. Training alone has not solved this in years, and the committee’s own report all but admits it: isolated directives and occasional workshops will not cut it.

The actual solution is boring but necessary. We need local records that do not vanish every time the barangay leadership changes. We must enforce a hard rule ensuring public money is controlled by public officials, rather than whichever private contractor refuses to hand over the checkbook.

Iloilo has had enough seminars. The barangays simply need to take back control of their own books.