‘Public must be vigilant of barangay support funds’

By Joseph B.A. Marzan

 

A budget expert warned the public on Tuesday to be “vigilant” over funds allocated in the national budget to support barangays under the Duterte administration’s counter-insurgency task force.

Activists Lean Porquia and Twitter user @darnitJC hosted a Twitter Space Tuesday evening to discuss the budget of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) under Republic Act No. 11518 (General Appropriations Act of 2021).

Activists have been calling to defund the task force after its spokespersons, Presidential Communications Undersecretary Lorraine Partosa and Armed Forces General Antonio Parlade Jr., recently red-tagged Ana Patricia Non by accusing her of recruiting people into the Communist Party of the Philippines and its wings.

Non started the now-popular Maginhawa Community Pantry in Diliman, Quezon City as a response to the slow economic aid provided by the national government amid the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

On Tuesday, 15 senators filed Proposed Senate Resolution No. 709, censuring Parlade after he had called Senators Joel Villanueva, Sherwin Gatchalian, Nancy Binay, and Risa Hontiveros “stupid” for mulling the defunding the NTF-ELCAC.

The NTF-ELCAC has a P19.1-billion allocation for its programs and projects under Rep. Act No. 11518, with the most prominent allocations being P1.084 billion under the Philippine National Police (PNP), and P16.1 billion as Local Government Support Fund-Support to Barangay Development Program (LGSF-SBDP).

According to the Department of Budget and Management’s (DBM’s) Local Budget Circular (LBC) No. 135 issued on Jan. 20, 2021, the LGSF-SBDP is allocated to 822 “cleared” barangays across the country, each receiving not more than P20 million for projects related to the following areas:

– Farm-to-market roads;

– School buildings;

– Water and sanitation system;

– Health stations;

– Rural Electrification;

– Reconstruction, rehabilitation, repair, and other similar projects in connection with the occurrence of natural or human-induced calamities, epidemics, crises resulting from armed conflicts, insurgency, terrorism, and other catastrophes;

– Housing;

– COVID-19 vaccination, immunization,a nd other health-related projects;

– Agriculture, livelihood, and technical-vocational trainings and projects; and

– Assistance to indigent individuals or families in any of the following forms of assistance: Medical, Burial, Transportation, Food, Cash for Work, and Educational.

Despite the guidance from the DBM and the appropriations made under RA 11518, the allocations under PNP and the LGSF-SBDP are not outlined.

Western Visayas is one of the regions with the biggest allocations under the LGSF-SBDP with P1.48 billion appropriated.

Six barangays in Iloilo City and 36 barangays across the towns of Igbaras, Leon, Miag-ao, and Tubungan in Iloilo province are set to receive P20 million each.

LBC No. 135 mandates the LGSF-SBDP to be released to provincial and city governments, with provincial government also being mandated to implement and monitor implementation of projects under this appropriation instead of barangays.

NTF-ELCAC was created by President Rodrigo Duterte via Executive Order No. 70 on Dec. 4, 2018, to “[institutionalize] a Whole-of-Nation approach for the attainment of inclusive and sustainable peace”.

The live Twitter conversation featured Zy-za Nadine Suzara, Executive Director of Institute for Leadership, Empowerment, and Democracy (iLEAD), and Caloy Maningat, a researcher at the House of Representatives under Representative Arlene Brosas (Gabriela Party-list).

The forum was organized after Maningat, in a tweet on Sunday, pointed out Special Allotment Release Orders (SAROs) approved by the DBM from the 2021 national budget amounting to P9.66 billion, as listed in their website.

Suzara, who previously worked under former DBM Secretary Florencio Abad, pointed out that SARO approvals did not constitute actual fund releases.

She pointed out, however, that there is public concern over the prioritization of NTF-ELCAC funding instead of increased allocation to respond to the public health.

Maningat explained that the budget was higher than other regular government bodies, citing the 2021 budgets of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which had a total of P5.6 billion (without its attached agencies), and the Office of the Vice President (OVP), which only has P900 million.

He also called the NTF-ELCAC allocations “troubling”, owing to the red-tagging made by Partosa and Parlade not only recently, but also in recent years since the task force’s creation.

Suzara said that the country’s taxpayers have the right to know where the money is, pointing out the non-outlining of projects in RA 11518, as well as the existence of other subsidies released to local government units (LGUs) under other existing laws.

Other significant allocations for LGUs under RA 11518 include the following:

– Special Shares of LGUs in the Proceeds of National Taxes;

– Tobacco Excise Tax under Republic Act Nos. 7171, 8240, and 10351;

– Utilization and Development of National Wealth under Rep. Act Nos. 7160 (Local Government Code of 1991) and 9513 (Renewable Energy Act of 2008);

– Gross Income Taxes paid by all Businesses and Enterprises within the Economic Zones under R.A. No. 7922 (Cagayan Special Economic Zone Act of 1995); and

– Incremental Collections from Value Added Taxes under Rep. Act Nos. 7643 and 8424 (Amendments to the National Internal Revenue Code).

“We’re taxpayers, and we should definitely care about the national budget, how it’s being allocated, what the priorities are every year. Why this is glaring, it’s because this is a time of crisis, and the crisis we’re facing is not just with this pandemic. The public health crisis has worsened into a socio-economic crisis. The financial resources of the country are not unlimited. So why does it matter? Because number one, we are taxpayers, and number two, we should have a say on what the government’s priorities should be,” said Suzara.

She also explained that it would be difficult to challenge the task force’s allocations as a “post-enforcement authority” since this was under the executive branch of the government.

The Supreme Court in the 2013 case of Belgica vs. Ochoa ruled unconstitutional the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) or more commonly known as the “pork barrel”, for being a “post-enactment measure”.

A post-enactment authority or measure in the case referred to the allocations made by members of Congress after the execution of an appropriation law, allocating a lump sum of money without defining specific programs or projects.

She said that while pork barrel and the NTF-ELCAC allocations were “similar”, the high court’s ruling referred only to “illegal” actions by legislators.

“The ruling of the Supreme Court on post-enactment authority only applies to Congress, which they said does not have the authority to do so, stemming from the PDAF scandal then. It only applied to the members of Congress because they said that these members should not interfere with the budget of the national government,” she explained.

She called on the public to monitor how the NTF-ELCAC budget will be implemented, reiterating the lack of outlined projects in this year’s budget law as well as its downloading to LGUs.

“I was hinting in my tweets that people should be vigilant in monitoring how these funds will be used, because SAROs are not publicly available, but what is important is that we know the beneficiaries of the project especially that it will go down to [LGUs], so monitoring in the local level is important. The important questions to answer are: Have they been implemented, and how much were the contracts?” she said.

Daily Guardian has reached out to Department of Interior and Local Government-Region 6 (DILG-6) Director Juan Jovian Ingeniero for more information on the LGSF-SBDP allocations and their utilization but he has yet to respond as of this writing.