Following weeks of impasse between the executive and legislative branches, the House of Representatives announced Aug. 28 it aims to pass the 2019 national budget in October.
Smooth-sailing at first, the passage of the 2019 budget was marred by disagreements over the planned shift to cash-based budgeting, a system that sets a one-year project implementation period, instead of two years under the current obligations-based system, to cut underspending.
“We agreed to cooperate,” said House majority leader Rolando Andaya Jr. in a press briefing.
“(Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno) agreed that the life of the budget will be extended to one year and a half. So in that sense, you have a hybrid (combining a cash-based and an obligation-based system),” Andaya added.
Diokno earlier in August said the executive is “ready for a reenacted budget” if the House chooses to reject the proposed 2019 national budget.
His statement came after House appropriations committee chair Karlo Nograles said a resolution was being drafted to recall the budget reform bill, certified urgent by President Rodrigo Duterte, and already passed and submitted to the Senate in March.
Nograles, who himself authored the budget reform bill shifting the country to a cash-based system, said the implication of the shift, lower budgets for government agencies, was never explained to legislators by the country’s economic managers.
Here is a timeline of the budget reform bill.
(Guided by the code of principles of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, VERA Files tracks the false claims, flip-flops, misleading statements of public officials and figures, and debunks them with factual evidence. Find out more about this initiative and our methodology.)