By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
With less than six months left in the year and the new president operating on the carry-over budget of the Duterte administration, Marcos Jr. and his Cabinet must move quickly to implement pending programs, especially those halted for months due to the ban on campaign season government spending.
The Chief Executive cannot afford to be held hostage by unfinished business and unrealized goals by the end of the year if he wants his fiscal policy rolling out the gates by 2023.
By now, it is expected that his economic team is already on the drawing board, pushing his priorities into Malacanang’s legislative agenda even before the 19th Congress convenes on July 25. On that date, Marcos Jr. will be standing before the session of both houses of Congress, not just for them to listen to his first State of the Nation Address (SONA), but to get them on board to bankroll his pet programs and projects.
While the perception is that this popularly-voted president has overwhelming numbers in the composition of the Senate and the House of Representatives, having the requested budgets of various departments approved is easier said than done.
With the high cost of operating agencies and the sinful salaries and allowances of many bureaucrats in “public service,” the Congress of the people are duty-bound to demand results and not excuses before passing their spending proposals.
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Suppose you’ve kept watch of the salient points spilled in the Commission on Audit’s annual report for 2021 released last month. In that case, there’s a lot to be disheartened about how our money and the money we borrow on interest to fulfill the government’s budgetary requirements are being spent.
Anybody searching for a whiff of corruption and incompetence in government needs only to browse through the agencies flagged by the COA and shake those trees for all the bad apples to fall out. That’s why the COA reports on each agency are an integral part of how legislators decide the General Appropriations Act.
It may not be the only basis of whether an agency of government is performing well or not. Still, the COA reports expose anomalous spending, redundancy, abuses, incompetence, and sloth in the bureaucracy by monitoring the numbers. And numbers don’t lie.
Last month, the powerful Commission on Appointments (CA) bypassed five of Duterte’s interim appointees to give Marcos Jr. a free hand in picking the heads of commissions with determinate terms of office. Among them was COA chief Rizalina Justol, a 40-year veteran in government with 10 years of experience as a state auditor on top of 21 years as a city government accountant.
Now, the top COA post has been entrusted by Marcos Jr. to former solicitor general Jose Calida. Apart from being a long-time ally of the Marcoses, Calida also holds the distinction of being the second-highest paid bureaucrat in the Duterte administration by virtue of excessive allowances flagged by the COA.
Let’s hope and pray this non-accountant does better with numbers and accounts than he did with legal accountabilities.
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