Senate realigns P300-M DICT’s proposed 2024 confi funds into regular spending items
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The Senate has diverted the Department of Information and Communications Technology's P300 million proposed confidential funds for 2024 into auditable regular spending items.
This was bared by Senator Grace Poe when defended the DICT's 2024 proposed budget during the Senate plenary debates on Tuesday dawn.
At the hearing, Senate Minority Leader Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III asked Poe if the DICT is still "insistent on their request for confidential funds."
Poe replied, that the DICT originally asked for P300 million "but now, we were able to return P280 million."
"So, when COA does its audit, they will be able to point out what the functions are of the equipment that was purchased. So, we just made it a line item," she added.
The Senate realigned some 72.3 million of the department's P280 million proposed confidential funds for the components, network, detection, and response called the NDRS—these are devices that are plugged into the systems of other government agencies that would enable the National Computer Emergency Response Team to monitor their systems; P48.2 million for the security of operations software which is for the renewal of the software needed to run the National Security Operations Center, which is similar to a command center where the NCERT team actively monitors the system of certain agencies.
About P79.7 million were diverted for the extended detection and response which are advanced anti-virus systems; the P19.8 million is allocated for the manpower who will monitor the NSOC control 24/7 and specialized equipment for scanning offline systems.
Further, some P20 million is provided for the vulnerability assessment and penetration testing tools which consist of application analysis, website analysis, and mobile application analysis; and P40 million for the Mobile Security Operation Center which consists of portable and software.
Poe noted that the remaining P20 million from the requested P300 million confidential funds of the DICT "is totally removed."
"Zero. None… P20 million was left pero di na natin sinama (it was not inluded). Wala ng (There's no) confidential fund at all. We didn't also put a line item budget for it because we didn't see the need for it," she said when Pimentel asked what happened to the remaining P20 million.
