BILLIONS of pesos were saved by the government, but what are these funds doing? No one knows.

The Alternative Budget Initiative (ABI), a consortium of 60 nongovernment organizations globally acknowledged for pioneering civil-society engagement in the national budget process, is challenging President Arroyo to release and order these billions of pesos in savings used for social-development programs before her term ends.

“Billions of pesos of people’s money were either impounded or realigned and transferred to overall savings under her term. This has caused delay and non-implementation of critical socioeconomic programs which translated to millions of Filipinos plunging below the poverty line with no job, no education, no health care and no food on their tables,” said former national treasurer Leonor Magtolis Briones, lead convenor of Social Watch Philippines, which leads the ABI.        

“The release of these overall savings should be PGMA’s legacy to the Filipino people before her term as President ends,” she added.        

Briones said that based on government reports, a total of P140.668 billion out of the P1.315-trillion 2008 budget has been reported as “overall savings.” The same reports showed these are not accumulated through efficient spending but rather through impoundment or nonrelease of appropriated amounts to various departments.

Briones traced the savings to the report on the National Expenditure Program (NEP) for fiscal year (FY) 2010, which said that the overall savings for FY 2008 was P140.668 billion. Then there is a “pooled savings” or total transfers from budgets of departments reaching P178.728 billion; while total transfers to budget of departments amounted to P38.059 billion. This yielded a net overall savings of P140 billion.

“This amount of overall savings is almost P34 billion more than the FY 2007 overall savings of P106.108 billion. It is also 13.19 percent of total new appropriations of the 2008 General Appropriations Act (GAA) which amounts to P1.066 trillion. Moreover, it is 140 times more than the overall savings in FY 2003 of P1.006 billion,” said Briones. “The President owes it to the people to account for these savings and immediately release these funds to programs with existing appropriations but have yet to be funded.”

“The government should be transparent in handling people’s money, and it should stop saying that the savings are ‘only amounts in paper’,” said Briones.  “The budget is listed on paper but this is converted into cash once the President orders its utilization. Therefore, she should be able to order the immediate release of these savings for programs for more than 3.7 million hungry Filipino families.”