IT IS A BUDGET decked with pork before and huge lump-sum or special purpose funds to this day. Many citizens are wont to believe that the budget is a document that hides more than it reveals.
Yet still, in terms of the simple availability of budget documents to the public – and not accountability in how funds are being spent r the integrity of the data enrolled int he documents — the Philippines seems to be doing quite well in a league of 30 mostly poor, developing countries in the world.
It is the only one of the 30 countries that has so far made major budget documents available, or even readily downloadable from the websites of the spending agencies.
On Sept. 12, 2104, the US-based International Budget Partnership (IBP) launched a new tracking tool, the Open Budget Survey Tracker to provide real-time information on the availability to the citizens of eight essential budget documents. By international good practice in budget transparency, these eight must published in a timely manner.
Research teams have been assigned to work with the OBS Tracker in 30 countries. Monitoring work started in November 2013 and will end in June 2015.
The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ), the Philippine researcher, has used as reference the budget calendar, which the agencies have adopted mostly by established practice. Thus far, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), Bureau of the Treasury (BTr), and the Commission on Audit (COA) have made the following documents available, covering three fiscal years: 2013, 2014, and 2015:
* 2015 Pre-budget Statement (PBS)
* 2015 Executive Budget Proposal (EBP)
* 2014 Enacted Budget (EB)
* Citizen’s Budget for EB and EBP
* In-Year Reports (Cash Operation, Revenues, Expenditure, and Debt Reports from the BTr and Status of Allotment Releases, Report on Utilization of Cash Allocation, and Disbursement Performance Reports from DBM)
* 2013 Mid-year Review
* 2014 Year-end Report
* 2012 Annual Audit Report
Of the 30 countries covered in the OBS Tracker, 14 are in Africa, 7 in Asia, 6 in Europe, and 3 in South America. In Asia, Philippines performed better than Kyrgyz Republic, Timor Leste, Vietnam, Palestsine, Iraq, and Myanmar, by the standard of making budget documents publicly available on time.
In the other countries, many budget documents were available for internal use only by officials. The citizen’s budget and mid-year review were commonly not produced. The non-disclosure of these documents to the public, according to the IBP, “leaves critical gaps in the public’s ability to understand how public money is being managed and, ultimately, assess how well the government is doing in delivering essential services such as health and education.”
In truth, the OBS Tracker is limited only to providing information on the timeliness of the public release of budget documents. It does not offer an assessment on the quality and comprehensiveness of the information enrolled in the documents. Neither does it capture the availability of data on the spending of lump-sum or special purpose funds that are relevant to current issues such as the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) in the Philippines’s case.
The OBS Tracker, nonetheless, complements the Open Budget Survey (OBS) that the IBP conducts in 100 countries every two years. At best, the OBS Tracker gives monthly updates on the availability of key budget documents. The Open Budget Survey, meanwhile, remains the definitive source for assessment of the broader public budget system within a country.
While less comprehensive than the Open Budget Survey, the timeliness of the OBS Tracker “allows governments to be recognized almost immediately when they take steps to be more transparent and enables stakeholders to track progress, identify gaps, and press for improvements,” the IBP said.
“Covering over 100 countries, the Open Budget Survey is the gold standard for assessing government budget transparency and accountability,” IBP Executive Director Warren Krafchik said in a press statement. “However, the research, analysis, and review for this comprehensive assessment takes two years, which creates significant gaps in monitoring and encouraging government improvements. So, we developed the OBS Tracker to provide certain fundamental budget information on a more frequent basis.”
“The OBS Tracker complements but doesn’t replace the full Open Budget Survey,” Kraftchick said. “It is like a thermometer or blood pressure gauge in that it can indicate the overall health of the system and identify where there might be problems, but it cannot provide a complete diagnosis.”
With help from the OBS Tracker, “governments that are opening their budgets will get the immediate recognition they deserve, and those that limit information, or restrict it further, will not be allowed to escape scrutiny.”
The IBP conducts the OBS every two years to assess governments’ budget transparency through a 100-point scale called the Open Budget Index (OBI). PCIJ has served as the Philippine researcher of the OBS since 2006.
The 30 countries covered by the OBS Tracker were, by and large, “drawn from among the least transparent as measured by the Open Budget Survey, in order to see whether having more up-to-date information will be a useful tool to encourage governments to improve transparency.”
Visitors to the OBS Tracker website will get an updated snapshot of how countries are doing, look at trends for each country over time, and download the actual budget documents that governments are publishing. – Rowena F. Caronan, PCIJ