The House of Representatives will activate its oversight powers over the 2021 General Appropriations Act (GAA) along with the laws extending the validity of the 2020 GAA and Bayanihan to Recover as One Act (Bayanihan 2).
With this, Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte, member of the independent majority bloc, welcomed this commitment of the House leadership to perform this year its budget oversight powers.
“The House leadership under Speaker [Lord Allan] Velasco would do well to make good on this newly declared commitment to keep a close watch on how agencies of the Executive department would be spending their allocations this year under the 2021 GAA, together with the 2020 national budget and Bayanihan 2, whose validity have been extended, respectively, till June and December,” he said.
Villafuerte was the lead author in the House of Bayanihan 2 and the Bayanihan to Heal as One Act (Bayanihan 1), and co-authored the recently signed laws extending the validity of the unspent portions of Bayanihan 2 to June 30, 2021 and of the 2020 GAA to December 31, 2021.
House Committee on Appropriations Eric Go Yap earlier expressed his commitment to safeguard the righteous expenditure of the people’s budget.
“Our responsibility as the appropriations chair does not end once the budget is enacted. Aside from our regular committee work, we will exercise the oversight function of the committee to look into how the budget will be spent throughout the year,” Yap said.
“This would be the best way for lawmakers to safeguard taxpayers’ money, especially at this time when the national budget deficit has been widening because of the necessity for Malacañang to secure additional borrowings and dramatically raise public spending on cash-intensive programs to fight Covid-19 and keep businesses afloat,” he added.
Villafuerte, however, added that, “Speaker Velasco would do well to return Cha-cha to the back burner as devoting the chamber’s attention to this highly divisive and counterproductive activity is just a waste of taxpayers’ money, especially at this time when we legislators could best be earning our keep by working with the Executive department on measures to deal with the lingering pandemic.”
Although Villafuerte has been one of the top advocates of constitutional reform under the Duterte presidency, he said that amid the pandemic, the situation has changed and “the ship has sailed” on this political reform as “Cha-cha should have been done yesterday.”
He said “the Congress’ time and effort would be best spent, not on tackling Cha-cha, but on passing pending measures and crafting new measures that would beef up our Covid-19 response.”
He said that, for instance, Congress should work double-time on passing the consolidated version of the proposed Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises Act (CREATE), which, in cutting corporate income taxes, would become the country’s biggest stimulus package ever, particularly for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) that make up 99 percent of local businesses and employ a majority of workers.
He said Congress has yet to pass, too, another Covid-related stimulus package, namely, the Government Financial Institutions (GFIs) Unified Initiatives to Distressed Enterprises for Economic Recovery or GUIDE bill, which will let GFIs create special holding companies that can infuse equity into pandemic-hit, strategically important corporations with insolvency issues.