ILOILO CITY -- Antique Governor Rhodora J. Cadiao on Friday reminded government agencies of their low spending of budget use may cause problems in the coming years.
The lady governor, who chairs the Regional Development Council (RDC) of Western Visayas, cited a report of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) that the utilization rate of government agencies was between 35 to 60 percent.
The DBM will go full swing in its shift to cash-based budget in 2019. Under this scheme, agencies are limited to budget proposals for payments of goods and services that they can actually deliver for the year.
In Western Visayas, the RDC has reviewed the 2019 budget proposals of 24 regional line government agencies and 12 state universities and colleges totaling to PHP162,215,192.
Of the figure, 84 percent represents their budget for Tier 1 or their regular appropriations and 16 percent or PHP26,728,113 for Tier 2 that are mostly requests for additional positions, miscellaneous and other expenses and capital outlay.
“While we push for higher batting approval for Region 6, the challenge is the speed and efficiency of our spending the money allocated for us,” Cadiao said.
She added that last year “many agencies returned unspent funds for 2016 and even now agencies are still spending their 2017 budget balances”.
“If this is so then, these agencies will be facing huge challenge in 2018 and more so in 2019,” she said.
“This becomes a challenge on how do we fare, how do we perform in 2018,” said Engineer Al Fruto, Assistant Regional Director of the Department of Public and Works and Highways in Region 6.
He said the government targets, supposedly by end the year, the disbursement rate of 65 percent and the absorptive capacity at around 80 percent.
By reaching this, he added that “realistically they would be able to spend the money intended for the year because the obligational authority to spend the budget is one year”.
He, however, said there were also issues on late releases like with the case of convergence projects, and cases that projects identified in the General Appropriations Act are different from what was subjected to bidding. (PNA)
