Ill-gotten wealth per se

The proverbial People’s House, Congress, if you will, in its official and unofficial acts, is giving public administration discipline (i.e., public policy, governance, development) a bad name.

In the matter of the national budget, one might wonder if it’s a healthy sign of robust revenue generation that monies experience a “spill-over” (i.e., x number of luggage stacked with millions of pesos, into the hands of unscrupulous high politicians in both lower and upper chambers.

The loot, nay, the “sprawl,” was so humongous that it took up all the space in a plush residence or condominium. Worse, the x number of luggage was even transported straight to offices as if no one was looking, as if without suspicious contents.

Taxpayers only prove too “resilient” to a fault. They seem simply “indifferent” where their taxes go and how public funds are being “embezzled” for anyone to even profess to have dutifully superintended all those they call “line or zero-based budgeting,” “continuing appropriation,” “surplus budgeting,” “one-fund concept,” “foregone revenues,” “sunk costs,” et cetera.

Corruption at the highest levels appears to be enriching the discipline’s lingua franca in every oblique way, come to think of it. Who wouldn’t suspect that perhaps even the whole range of acronym-clad “ayuda” is being “siphoned off” by their “sponsoring proponents?”

When public spending is not within the reach of the Commission on Audit at the preexpenditure stage, it becomes a license to incur delinquencies, disallowances and deficiencies.

It’s no wonder that since its debut on 24 August 2011, Senate Concurrent Resolution 10, which “established a system where members of the Philippine Congress could liquidate expenses, particularly Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses, through a certification of expenses instead of submitting official receipts,” remains a tolerated political currency never officially repealed.

This unique “liquidation by certification” and its enabling “conjuncts” (i.e., Senate Committee on Accounts Circulars 93-001 and 98-001) are not without their critics since it practically set aside oversight and turned accountability into a form of “legalized corruption.”

Reportedly, it was principally crafted by the chair of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee at the time and so perhaps there’s a need now to condemn the practice.

With 24 senators and 318 representatives with this “signing privilege” of sorts, there’s reason to believe it has become unhealthy for democracy and the bureaucracy that has turned not only blind but even mute and deaf insofar as these specified types of expenditures are concerned.

Truly, the three-page document containing six “whereases” has to be revisited in light of the corruption that is yet unresolved to this day.

Precisely, the text as adapted at the time reads, viz: “Resolved, as it is hereby resolved by the Senate, the House of Representatives concurring, that the prevailing system of accounting and liquidation of the respective budgetary allocations of each member of the Senate and the House of Representatives as classified and consistent with applicable accounting and auditing rules shall be maintained.”

On another front, there just emerged a new revenue burden that could be good cause for “fiscal panic” by this government at this “critical juncture.” In fact, the shocks immediately reached our shores and if the geopolitical problem drags on for an indefinite period of time in what an expert calls a “war of attrition,” then we are in for the long haul.

This crisis saves only “the superpowers, the middle powers,” but never the nation-states like ours. Some two million OFWs are affected by this “ongoing war” in the Middle East, where we are a principal exporter of labor. If their remittances are disrupted, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas calculates a “strain in household budgets” apart from the uncertainty of lower inflows that could “trigger inflationary consequences.”

It’s time to make every peso count and to make accountability at the highest levels truly matter — no exception, no self-serving budgetary dynamics, no modus vivendi whatsoever for whomsoever.