Here’s why graft prevails in RP

Congress has practically abdicated the power of the purse to the executive branch, failing to scrutinize the annual national budget thoroughly and facilitating corruption in the process, a UN-financed study said. The Philippine Human Development Report sponsored by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the New Zealand Agency for International Development said more often than not debates in the House on the budget deals not with policy but parochial concerns.

“Questions about agency performance are asked only intermittently and superficially. Cost estimates of budget proposals are rarely challenged,” it said. “Weak accountability is facilitated by weak congressional oversight, not only in practice, but in law. In fact, it is the executive and not Congress that wields effective power of the purse,” said Toby Monsod of the NGO Human Development Network, which conducted the study. The 173-page report scored the presidential practice of making political appointees, noting 81 excess undersecretaries and assistant secretaries as of December 2007 costing the government P58 million a year. Eighty nine percent of them were ineligible, it added.

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