Lost in translation

Iam finding it more and more difficult to understand how well government is doing in managing public finance.Are revenues adequate to finance the budget?Has the BIR improved in tax collection? Is the expenditure program managed well? Are we going to incur more and more debts to finance the more than half a trillion budget deficit?

We used to have access to data that helped us understand the state of our public finance. But the most recent table in the website of the Bureau of Treasury is of 2017 vintage. All we have now are press releases from government. We have to piece information from several press releases in order to get a complete picture. I certainly miss the up-to-date cash operations report which then National Treasurer Bobby Tan posted in the website.

I am getting lost in the translation as well.Government credits the TRAIN for adding 163.3 billion more to revenue collection.But at the same time, the treasury says that BIR missed its collection target by 6.0%. It only collected 11.95 billion instead of its target of 12.07 billion. Did TRAIN do little to improve efficiency in tax collection? By the same token, did not government say that TRAIN would bring in additional revenues of P90.0 billion (P63.0 billion for infrastructure and P27.0 billion for social services)? Does this mean that TRAIN was off-target too? What happened during the process of translating the forecasts into actual collection? And why hasn’t government stepped up the implementation of the subsidy program to help the public cope with the increase in the tax on fuel?The newspapers recently carried a report that less than one half of the 155,337 fuel vouchers have not been claimed.

I am equally lost in appreciating the good news of the DBM Secretary that government has not been underspending.The figures on fund disbursements, allotments, and obligations of national government agencies that are found in the DBM website do not say so.In 2017 for example, disbursements equalled 11.50 trillion compared to a budgetary allotment of 12.42 billion.That leaves government with an under-spending of 1920 billion. The figure is lower if we compare disbursements (11.50 billion) with obligations, 1778 billion, or a disbursement rate of 65.8%.In simple terms, this means that government was only able to spend 66% of its budget.

The disbursement rate for 2018 is even lower at 64.2%. Government disbursed 11.065 trillion of its obligations of 11.66 trillion. Government committed to spend 11.66 trillion in 2018 but was unable to spend the entire amount. That leaves us with an underspending of 1595 billion. In the face of underspent funds, why should taxpayers carry the burden of new taxes?It may be a cliché, but government’s first priority is to do some housekeeping.This requires improving productivity of government agencies and streamlining processes so that absorptive capacity can increase, and procurement issues can be addressed.

I may indeed be lost in translation, but those of us who are non-state members of government have an obligation to make government account for its actions. This role, we are unable to do without access to correct information or worse, if we are given fake news.

mguevara@synergeia. org.ph