WITH more than P200 billion in unspent budget, Budget Secretary Florencio B. Abad on Monday urged government agencies and departments to boost spending in the next four months of fiscal year 2015.
Revealing that P208.3 billion of the national budget remains unreleased by end-August this year, the budget chief said the allocation for hiring new teachers has not been released since the Department of Education
(DepEd) has yet to file requests to cover the requirements of DepEd teacher positions.
The programmed allocations for local government units and government- owned and -controlled corporations have not been released, as well, since these are subject to program-implementation plans and funding requests.
Abad said the administration relies on the disbursement improvement measures, such as GAA-as-release-document
regime and full-time delivery units in all agencies to boost budget spending.
“The measures that have improved spending performance in 2015 will have had more time to take root in the bureaucracy next year. This is important, because the government will be prepared for the expected acceleration of public spending before the elections in May,” he said.
Abad added that disbursements from January to August also grew to P1.44 trillion, which is 11.4 percent higher than the P1.3-trillion figure recorded over the same period in 2014.
Growth in spending was due to increases in maintenance and infrastructure spending of 26.6 percent and 21.5 percent, respectively.
“The last three months have seen an average growth rate of 20 percent, a stark improvement over the 6.7-percent average growth we tracked from January to May,” Abad said.
Among agencies with high spending include the departments of Public Works and Highways and National Defense, after these departments improved their utilization rates for notices of cash allocation in August.