Budget crooks must stand trial

Budget crooks must stand trial | Daily Tribune

The Department of Budget and Management ignored that condition. The magistrates found surpluses in selected revenue lines while the aggregate budget ran deficits, then the DBM certified “excess” collections to unlock unprogrammed funds.

DBM records showed the UA had progressively jumped — from P395.5 billion in 2023 to P564 billion in 2024 before sliding back to P487 billion in 2025. All this public money was rerouted from appropriations Congress had actually itemized and debated into a catch-all bucket to escape the usual scrutiny.

The Bicameral Conference Committee (Bicam) compounded the abuse. While its constitutional function is to harmonize the House and Senate versions of the General Appropriations Bill, it had morphed into a third chamber of Congress where post-enactment discretion was manufactured.

Many of the insertions put in by the Bicam went into the UA. The 2024 General Appropriations Act (GAA) listed 51 purposes under the UA. By this year’s budget that had been trimmed to three, an implicit admission that the earlier list had festered beyond anything resembling legitimate categories.

Funds meant for contingencies such as calamities, foreign-assisted projects and the Armed Forces of the Philippines modernization became, in practice, a parking lot for projects that reappeared in the Bicam’s final output, where no floor vote could remove them.

Whoever controlled the Bicam’s drafting pen controlled which projects materialized, with a fraction of the public accountability that program appropriations carry.

Solicitor General Darlene Berberabe had a metaphor for it: A tool not “inherently” corrupt, but one whose discretionary nature — in which the ceiling is set by the executive, the DBM interprets its release trigger and the Bicam inserts projects — created repeated opportunities for kickbacks.

The removal of the broad discretion over budget items would require statutory triggers rather than administrative ones. The pending budget modernization bills would legislate the trigger conditions directly such as aggregate revenue performance only, with DBM certification subject to Commission on Audit pre-audit rather than a review after the fact. This removes the discretion that allowed 2024’s revenue mislabeling.

After the SC struck down the Priority Development Assistance Fund in 2013, the crooks in government became innovative. They devised ways for discretionary post-enactment control over public money through a vehicle the High Tribunal hadn’t specifically condemned.

The UA fits the requirements precisely. They are not, in themselves, unconstitutional, as even the petitioners challenging the 2024 and 2025 budgets conceded.

Justice Marvic Leonen, before the close of oral arguments, set out three concrete requirements for the government to account for the Bicam insertions.

He noted that both the House-approved bill and the Senate version of the 2024 national budget were consistent with the National Expenditure Program submitted by the Executive. Yet, the bicam’s final report introduced an additional P400 billion to P500 billion in appropriations that were absent from either chamber’s debated version.

It behooves the administration to account for every centavo of the amount, which was curiously identical to the estimated amount of projects from which kickbacks stuffed into suitcases and distributed to maintain the web of corruption came from.