Perpetuating ‘pork’ for 2015 and beyond

The Next Page by Dean dela Paz

Part one of a two-part series

The corruption continues. And how insulting it is. As prefaced by the President’s spokesman, the budget for 2015 “stands as a testament to the lengthy reviews and planning undertaken by agencies, in order to improve the way they serve the public.” Let us peel away the lies. There is literal duplicity as there are effectively two budgets—the official budget and its supplement; one declared pork-free, the other, fat, pork-laced and bloated.

The first had taken months to pass amid controversies that took away our lawmakers full focus. The second, a scant few hours, or perhaps, to give solons the benefit of the doubt, one full day.

As most of us were preoccupied with last month’s Christmas rush, like thieves in the night seizing the opportunity for a fast one, the redoubtable Philippines Congress employed a similar Christmas rush of its own. A scant working hours before adjourning, the Senate passed the 2015 Supplemental Budget closely on the heels of similarly passing the General Appropriations Act (GAA) of 2015. Benigno Aquino III has signed the budget into law saying it no longer has the Priority Development Assistance Fund (Pdaf) hidden within its lump sums. He is saying nothing of the second budget. That one has it.

Now into the anticlimactic new year, the proximity of one budget’s processes to the other and the substantive impetus for what was effectively either an amendment or an entirely distinct second budget as the first had yet to be signed into law when the second was submitted to the Senate, these, as well as the fact that bold declarations that the GAA would not contain any amount of illegal pork barrel in any of its reincarnations, combinations and permutations behooves that we revisit the congressional hustle. It isn’t only because the public distrusts the legislature. It is more that the legislature has proven time and again that it is untrustworthy.

The public is keenly cognizant of this curious sequence of events and is wary and watchful over the inclusion of any form of “pork barrel,” whether it is another reincarnation of the criminal PDAF or congressional pork barrel, the Development Acceleration Program (DAP) or presidential pork barrel, or simply discretionary lump-sum allocations.

For our self-declared honorable men and women of the Legislative Branch, it is important to exercise extreme prudence over the expenditures included in the supplemental budget to disabuse suspicions of a public already skeptical of the legislature and that the latter has fashioned one budget that excludes pork barrel allocations while another includes it.

Before delving into this diabolical pig’s innards and divining its entrails let us set up our criteria. One, the allocation must have been identified as an integral program of its recipient agency for 2015. As with the impetus for the DAP, it must be an economic stimulus or a GDP driver and lead to inclusive economic growth. Thus, it must directly increase employment and alleviate poverty. Moreover, the allocation must quantifiably catalyze GDP growth. It must increase household spending, agricultural, manufacturing or services-sector productivity, increase exports over imports and fund government-infrastructure spending in such areas as power, utilities, transportation and telecommunications as these are the components of the GDP formula.

On matters concerning administrative criminality in a contrived budgeting process, allocations must not have been previously rejected as a PDAF or DAP project or previously a cross-border transfer defined under the SC G.R. 209287 on “pork barrels.” As supplements, these must be of an urgent nature. These must also not be lumped and with unspecified uses. For inclusion, allocations must satisfy the preceding requisites, otherwise the expenditures should have been included in the GAA and should have been actually requested by recipient agencies, justified by them and included within the scope of their 2015 planning and agenda.

Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. First, the lawmakers assumed a GDP growth rate of 8.0 percent.

Never mind that real data have shown slippages to 6.0 percent and below as early as January. In the concluding part of this series, we will analyze specific insertions in the second budget. Alongside each, we will simply apply any one or more of our criteria, beginning with the undeniably politically motivated.

Should we see in that pork-barrel DNA in the concluding part of this two-part series, then it would not be unfair to conclude that our officials have once more lied and continue to lie well into 2015 and beyond.

Dean dela Paz is an investment banker. He is a consultant in the fields of finance and banking. He is likewise an energy consultant having served on the Boards of several foreign-owned independent power producers and as CEO of a local energy provider. He currently teaches Financial Management, Business Policy, Strategic Management and Investment Mathematics. A business columnist for the last seventeen years, he first wrote for BusinessWorld under the late-Raul Locsin and then as a regular columnist for the Business Mirror and GMANews TV. He now writes for the Philippine Online Chronicles and PORTAL, and is a contributor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He also co-authored a book and policy paper on energy toolkits for a Washington- based think-tank, and co-authored and edited a book on management.