THE Energy Regulatory Commis-sion (ERC) has appealed to have its proposed 2022 budget of P987.458 million restored, underscoring its intent to increase the salaries of its workforce in order to do its work more efficiently.
The Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has slashed the ERC’s proposed budget to P586.516 million. The proposed budget for next year is already lower than the previous year’s P1 billion.
The DBM cited the ERC’s low utilization of its budget in 2019 and 2020 as the reasons why it reduced the 2022 proposed budget. It said that only 71 percent was utilized in 2019 and 69 percent in 2020. For this year, the obligation rate is only 28 percent as of end-June.
ERC chairman Agnes Devanadera explained the reason for this: the 2019 budget was approved only in April 2019. For 2020, Devanedera said the utilization rate stood at 76.7 percent. “We all know there is a DBM circular saying that because of the pandemic we cannot use CI [congressional initiative]. We needed to ask permission from the Office of the President for the utilization of CI. But we all know that these things, I suppose, were used for the pandemic as supported by DBM circular.”
She also clarified that as of August 2021, the ERC has a utilization rate of 40 percent.
Devenadera also said the agency is swamped with 600 pending applications for power supply agreements (PSAs) and capital expenditure (capex) project approvals. There are ongoing public hearings on these cases, said the ERC chief. However, there are few lawyers and engineers working on these cases. Moreover, the agency’s salary rate is not competitive enough to maintain personnel.
“Our technical people are not able to resist the offers of private sectors. We can’t blame them. This is the difficulty we have in ERC and amount of budget we have is quite small.
Over the past three months, we lost four senior lawyers because the private sector pirated them. Aside from the budget is really a plea that the DBM approve our request for salary increase because under the EPIRA [Electric Power Industry Reform Act], the ERC is not supposed to be covered by salary standardization,” said Devanadera.
If the ERC’s requests are heeded, Devanadera said the agency will be able to fully utilize its proposed budget. “I am happy to say that the absorptive capacity of the ERC has substantially increased. With the Bids and Awards Committee [BAC] split into two, we are likewise grateful to the DBM for our request for a plantilla position for the BAC. It’s really a case of having the right people in the BAC. We see no reason why we cannot improve our absorptive capacity.”