CONGRESS, before Duterte came to power, would have carved a niche in history, if only it had used its wisdom and experience to restore public trust through its lawmaking and oversight functions, instead of just plodding along in excessive partisanships and highly anomalous and irregular actions.
Some of the highly publicized scandals arose from pork barrels and the highly questionable privatization of moneymaking multibillion-peso corporations, as well as heavily indebted financial institutions and government-owned companies.
Congress’s image hit rock bottom because of the preoccupation of some of its members with popular causes and those that served their political and economic interests. The more important business of checking deficit spending, foreign borrowing and debt restructuring, among other questionable actions, committed by the previous administrations were conveniently obfuscated.
Under the Constitution, Congress (House and Senate) has two interrelated functions when it comes to allocations of public funds: authorization and appropriation, in that order.
In fact, these functions are explicitly written in Section 24, Article VI of the 1987 Constitution, which says: “All appropriation, revenue or tariff bills, bills authorizing increase of the public debt; bills of local application and private bills shall originate exclusively in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments.”
Unless the present Congress regains the exercise of these exclusive functions, there’s no way the government can spur economic growth, because under this culpable practice what is left for Congress to do is just the act of consenting without thoroughly deliberating if public funds are available or not, how funds, if available, are properly allocated to the national and local governments, how they are audited and accounted for to make sure that nothing is stolen and wasted.
And what happened to the pre-audit system?
Patterned after the US General Auditing Office’s practice since the time of John R. McCarl, an American lawyer and executive secretary of the national Republican Congressional Campaign Committee in 1921, the preaudit system had been in practice in government until 1972, when former President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared martial law, reorganized the government, and adopted the post-audit system that saw the abuse or misuse of government funds, particularly in the area of budgeting and allocation of funds for government-controlled corporations.
When President Aquino took over the presidency, her first appointed Commission on Audit chairman, Teofisto Guingona, attempted to restore the preaudit system, but was unsuccessful in doing so as Mrs. Aquino opted to maintain the Marcos postaudit system upon the suggestions of her financial advisers and some of the foreign creditors.
Her decision to adopt the post-audit system and the Marcos Presidential Decree (PD) 1177 marked her questionable actions and those of her successors, from President Fidel V. Ramos, to President Joseph E. Estrada, to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, to President Benigno S. Aquino III.
For instance, PD 1177, which automatically services foreign debt and domestic borrowings, without congressional interference, clearly violates the 1987 Constitution. In fact, some of its provisions were curiously correlated by Mrs. Aquino in the administrative code.
Another law, Proclamation 50, signed by President Aquino on December 15, 1986, further legitimized foreign debt and its automatic servicing, again, without congressional interference.
Under these two edicts, only the President, the finance secretary and the Bangko Sentral (Central Bank) governor have the power to allocate funds to service and restructure foreign and domestic borrowings, a function Congress abdicated since 1988 in clear violation of the 1987 Constitution.
If the number of cases and huge amount of money involved in scams against public officials, investigated or obfuscated were any indication on financial irregularities, the previous administrations were far worse based on historical records.
The Ramos government and the Aquino III regime may emerge as those with the most number of big-time scams in the country’s history.
Just look at the Disbursement Acceleration Program and the Priority Development Assistance Fund multibillion-peso scams during the Aquino III presidency, which were outlawed by the Supreme Court and the Ramos government’s involvement in the multibillion-peso Philippine Estates Authority-Amari deal; the P9-billion centennial irregularity; the P7.8-billion missing Armed Forces of the Philippines trust modernization fund; the P42-billion housing scandal between 1987 and 1999; the multibillion-peso oil-revenue irregularity; the mismanagement of the soldiers’ trust funds; the nonremittance of the P14-billion national government contributions to the Government Service Insurance System; and the highly scandalous and irregular deals involving the National Steel Corp. and the National Power Corp., which was unearthed by former Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile.
In the centennial scam, the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee recommended the criminal and administrative prosecution of Ramos and five of his Cabinet members.
Corporate crimes in the Philippines, both prosecuted and not prosecuted, were more pervasive and more damaging than all street crimes committed in the past 30 years, and the saddest part of the entire record was that all five presidents in the post-Marcos years have spent more than P35 trillion in accumulated budgets, compared to President Marcos’s accumulated budget of only P486.42 billion in 20 years. Yet, the Marcos regime, warts and all, had more to show in terms of tangible and intangible accomplishments.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com.