It took President Arroyo about a month and a half to approve the P1.414-trillion national budget from the time it was sent to her office. This did not jibe with the calculation of lawmakers that the President would sign the 2009 general appropriations act into law in two weeks? time after Congress passed the final version of the money measure in late January.  Due to the delay in approving the new budget, the government was forced to rely on the reenacted 2008 budget. Worse, the new budget will take effect only on April 1?or two weeks after the presidential signing as prescribed by law.

  Meanwhile, programs and projects, especially public works, funded by the 2009 budget could not be started.  The timetable for constructing infrastructure projects is derailed. Perhaps this problem would have been overcome if the proposal of Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile for the effectivity of the new appropriations law to retroact to Jan. 1 was adopted.  But the move to insert this special provision was scrapped for unclear reasons.

Lawmakers had feared that the P50-billion-cut in the debt service allocation would be vetoed by Mrs. Arroyo. But it was not. What was vetoed by the Chief Executive, according to Budget Secretary Rolando Andaya, was ?the concept of debt service being appropriated by the President? or the tendency of Congress to treat it as new appropriation contrary to the statutory rule that it is automatically allocated.  ?It is not up to the President to decide whether to reduce or increase debt servicing because our law provides that it is automatically appropriated,? Andaya asserted.

With this clarification, the senators and congressmen could now heave a sigh of relief.  It was from the realigned P50-billion fund that they augmented the funding of various state agencies and created a Pl0-billion economic stimulus package. However, a huge chunk of this fund has been re-channeled to their pork barrel projects. This was confirmed by Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman, former chairman of the House appropriations committee and Senator Panfilo Lacson, who has made it a personal policy not to avail of his pork barrel privilege.

Congressional leaders had exerted extra efforts to pass the new budget before the end of 2008 in the hope that the obnoxious practice of reenacting the old budget could be avoided. But their efforts went to naught because they were working under extreme time constraints.  The practice of the Arroyo administration has been to submit the budget bill to Congress in the last week of August, or a month after the opening of the regular session when she delivers her State-of-the Nation Address.  This gives the House of Representatives less than three months to deliberate on the budget. Since the Senate receives the budget bill from the House only by mid-November, that means the Senate is left with only a month to review and deliberate on it and pass its own version before the year-end adjournment.

  Congress would be spared of the perennial problem of time constraints if only the President would submit the budget bill at the opening of the regular session of Congress on the fourth Monday of July. This would give the legislature an additional month to work on the budget. This was actually the practice during the time of past presidents?Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos and Joseph Estrada. And true enough, seldom was the budget approval delayed during their terms.

  The mechanism of a re-enacted budget has only served to expand the already formidable powers of the President over government?s finances. While the Constitution allows the reenactment of the budget to avoid a paralysis of government operations, it was clearly intended to be a safety measure to be used sparingly, not frequently. However, Rep. Teofisto Guingona III (2nd district of Bukidnon) says the Arroyo administration has taken comfort in using this safety measure every single year.

?This is not something that should go unnoticed.  Not only is a re-enacted budget usually antiquated in addressing the needs of the people. It also unintentionally gives the President wide discretion in spending the people?s budget without any accountability.  Remember that a reenacted budget allows the President to realign any amount not released from the previous year?s budget to whatever items she desires, while also effectively leaving two budgets for one year at her own disposal,? Guingona points out.

The 1987 Constitution provides that no funds can be expended without prior authorization of Congress. Theoretically, this gives Congress the power over the purse. But Senator  Edgardo Angara, chairman of the committee on finance, says that this is not so in practice. In fact, he says that the power of the purse has been ?effectively removed? from the legislature because of: l. the power of the President to prescribe the limit on the budget and the prohibition on Congress to deploy resources according to its judgment; and 2. the power of the President to impound appropriations.

?A very pernicious and pervasive problem that may have been unwittingly spawned by the 1987 Constitution was the transferring of the power of the purse from Congress to the President. The President is already powerful, but when we add the power of the purse to the arsenal of weapons (at her disposal), then we do not have to call him or her a dictator but he or she is definitely the most powerful president ever anywhere in the world,? Angara states.

  In addition, the President is also vested with the power to line-veto specific items in the budget, the power to reallocate savings and the power to unilaterally contract loans.

  The Freedom from Debt Coalition argues that the President virtually exercises ?fiscal dictatorship.? But if that were the case, Congress itself is partly to blame. Since Congress was restored in 1987, several attempts were made to repeal a remnant of Martial Law rule, Presidential Decree 1177, which authorizes automatic appropriation for debt service. But Congress has failed to do so. In the 2008 national budget, Congress inserted a provision that prohibits the President from impounding pork barrel allocations of lawmakers?a power which the incumbent Palace occupant has ruthlessly used to get back at her detractors in Congress. This provision was vetoed by the President, but Congress did not lift a finger to overturn the veto.

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Who says the United Coconut Planters Bank is not as aggressive as its competitors in the banking system? The UCPB registered a double-digit growth in total assets last year on the back of the robust expansion of its deposits and loans. Total assets of the bank reached P114.4 billion at the end of 2008, nearly P13 billion or 12 percent higher than the P101.7 billion a year before. UCPB executive vice president and chief finance officer Cesar Rubio reports that total deposits of the bank rose P16 billion or nearly 21 percent during the period from P77.6 billion to P93.6 billion. On the other hand, total loans of the bank rose by nearly P11 billion or 48 percent, from P22 billion to P32.5 billion on the hefty increase of commercial and consumer loans,.

  At the same time, UCPB?s foreign remittance receipts grew 13 percent on strong inflows from overseas Filipino workers and foreign companies with local offices and business partners in the Philippines.  UCPB vice president for remittance marketing Ruben Tuason informed us that the bank?s foreign remittance value increased to $2.81 billion last year from $2.49 billion the year before.

f_maragay@yahoo.com