When oversight becomes overreach
We should be able to track the money from the National Expenditure Program to its actual disbursement.
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We should be able to track the money from the National Expenditure Program to its actual disbursement.
If the alleged P1-trillion corruption in ghost flood control projects is true, the scandal is not simply about m i s s i n g projects or stolen money.
It is about a budget system that allowed enormous amounts of public money to move through several layers of review without anyone apparently stopping the abuse.
That raises the more important question of where the safeguards failed rather than who pocketed the money.
We should be able to track the money from the National Expenditure Program, or NEP, to its actual disbursement. The purpose is not to prejudge guilt, but to establish when and where significant changes occurred, why they were made, who authorized them, and whether the rules designed to prevent abuse actually worked.
The budget process is not a single act. It goes through several stages and institutions. If billions could be diverted to nonexistent projects, the problem may not be the architecture of the system but the integrity of the pipeline.
Congress exercises the constitutional power of the purse. But the purse belongs to the people. Congress merely holds the power in trust.
The budget itself, however, does not originate in Congress.
Executive departments and agencies prepare their proposed budgets. The Department of Budget and Management, or DBM, reviews, vets and consolidates them within the government’s fiscal framework, considering revenues, priorities, spending limits, performance and implementation capacity.
The resulting NEP is the Executive’s proposed spending program for the succeeding fiscal year. It is still a plan that the President submits to Congress for consideration.
The House conducts hearings, deliberations and may amend the proposal before approving its version, which becomes the General Appropriations Bill for transmittal to the Senate. The Senate repeats the review cycle, considers and approves its own version.
When the two versions differ, a bicameral conference committee is created by both houses with their designated representatives to reconcile the two versions. The bicam report must then be approved by both chambers before the measure is sent to the President, who may sign it or exercise his constitutional veto power, including the line-item veto applicable to appropriations.
Once approved, this measure becomes the General Appropriations Act.
There are therefore several points at which public spending can be examined. If the alleged corruption reached hundreds of billions of pesos, or even P1 trillion, the public needs to know what happened at each of these stages.
If major changes were introduced during the legislative process, particularly during the bicameral reconciliation, were they properly scrutinized and documented? It is not a bureaucratic question but a question of accountability.
There should be a comprehensive, publicly accessible audit trail showing how significant appropriations evolved from the NEP to the House version, the Senate version, the bicameral report and finally the General Appropriations Act.
Every significant insertion, deletion, increase, reduction and realignment should be traceable.
The record should tell us what changed, when it changed, why it changed, who proposed or authorized it, and where the money came from and where it is going.
Congress has every constitutional right to amend the Executive’s proposal. But constitutional authority should never be confused with unaccountable discretion. The larger the change, the greater the obligation to explain it.
This is especially important when substantial appropriations appear late in the legislative process without a clear public record explaining their origin and rationale.
The bicameral process is intended to reconcile differences between the two chambers. It should never become a black box from which major allocations mysteriously emerge.
Before the budget reaches Congress, the DBM is responsible for reviewing agency proposals and maintaining fiscal discipline within the Executive branch.
Once the budget is submitted to Congress, the DBM cannot dictate what legislators should appropriate. Congress is a separate and coequal branch. The DBM may provide technical assistance, but legislative appropriations remain the responsibility of Congress.
And when ghost projects later surface, who was responsible can become a game of institutional ping-pong.
The Executive points to Congress, Congress points to the bicameral process, agencies point elsewhere, and contractors become convenient targets. In the confusion, accountability disappears.
That is precisely what a good accountability system should prevent.
We do not necessarily need another committee, another signature, another layer of bureaucracy. We need something much simpler.
The budget should have a permanent audit trail from proposal to enactment and ultimately to expenditure. Every significant change should be visible, documented and traceable.
Congress has the power of the purse but does not own the people’s purse. It holds that power in trust.
Oversight is essential to constitutional government. But oversight must illuminate the use of public money, not obscure how that money was allocated.
The test should therefore be simple — where every significant peso in the final budget can be explained and traced to its origin. If not, then the problem is bigger than ghost projects; it is a failure of accountability.
Public money must never disappear into a maze of procedures where everyone can claim authority but no one can clearly establish responsibility. Oversight is a constitutional duty but not a license for unexplained intervention.
And if oversight ceases to expose how public money is allocated but instead helps to conceal it, then oversight becomes overreach.
