THE National Unity Party (NUP), the second-largest political bloc at the House of Representative, backed calls for lawmakers to publicly disclose their district allocations, Antipolo Rep. Ronaldo V. Puno said on Thursday.
Mr. Puno, chairman of the 58-member party, said NUP lawmakers were willing to provide civil society groups with details of their district allocations, adding that all members of Congress had an obligation to make such information available to the public.
“Yes, we fully support that,” he said during a press briefing. “In fact, today, I made a disclosure and explanation to the People’s Budget Coalition on my district, specifically I have informed them that any congressman in the National Unity Party is willing to provide them with such details.”
“And we think anybody in Congress has the obligation to do this,” he added.
He also supported a bottom-up approach to budget preparation, saying project proposals should begin at the barangay level before proceeding through local and regional development councils and eventually reaching government agencies.
“There’s no reason why these things will not be documented. So, yes, we believe that if it has no documentation, it has no right to be there,” Mr. Puno said.
The lawmaker’s remarks comes amid questions over erroneous coordinates of a farm-to-market road (FMR) project in the proposed 2027 national budget that appeared to place the road in the middle of the sea.
Bataan Rep. and House Appropriations Committee Senior Vice-Chairman Albert S. Garcia said upon validation, the project coordinates flagged by the People’s Budget Coalition turned out to be typographical errors.
“I asked my staff to coordinate with the People’s Budget Coalition, get the project, and validate it. So, it came out that it was a typo,” Mr. Garcia said.
He said the House-approved version of the 2027 budget contains a special provision allowing government agencies to correct typographical errors and misspelled project details to prevent legitimate projects from being excluded.
He acknowledged that errors should not have occurred in the first place, but said the government should find ways to correct them rather than automatically abandon the projects.
“Of course, I’m not defending those who encoded it, whether it’s the agency, the committee, or the House. Of course, it should be perfect, but human error happens and we can’t do anything about that,” he said in Filipino. “So, hopefully, we can rectify it so we can implement the project and ensure those special provisions don’t go to waste.”
Mr. Garcia said the provision retention in the Senate version would depend on the succeeding deliberations and the collective decision of lawmakers. — Pexcel John Bacon