Competitiveness council boosts drive for transparency, accountability

The National Competitiveness Council (NCC) is involving the private sector and civil society in formulating and monitoring budgets of localities and national government offices as part of the administration’s goal of improving fiscal transparency and accountability.

To kick off the process, NCC has organized a series of dialogues beginning today among key policy-makers, business and non-governmental organization (NGO) leaders and Budget Secretary Florencio Abad at the Hotel InterContinental in Makati City.

“The [dialogue] series is in line with the government’s thrust toward greater fiscal transparency and accountability, and more meaningful private-sector and citizen engagement in budget process. This dialogue will illustrate how constituents and taxpayers can review the status of the 2012 budget and analyze the 2013 budget,” NCC Co-Chairman Guillermo Luz said.

The Dialogue on Bottom-up Budgeting is a project of NCC’s Budget Transparency Working Group. It is part of NCC’s initiative to push for the streamlining and automated processing, releasing and tracking of budgets.

At the event, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) will also launch its new portal www.budgetngbayan.com, which is dedicated for the monitoring of the national budget.

The web site contains the budget preparation, list of priority expenditures and the citizen’s portal that would encourage the public to engage government agencies in the national budget.

“The online budget monitoring tool is the second phase of DBM’s electronic Transparency and Accountability Initiative for Lumpsum Funds [eTAILS], which was first launched in July 2011. eTAILS serves as a management information system that digitizes the processing of lumpsum funds and supports the timely disclosure of budget release online,” Luz said.

The bottom-up budgeting approach involves 609 “poorest” local government units (LGUs) in the country that will work with civil-society organizations and local communities in drafting their own programs and projects suitable to the needs of their jurisdiction.

At the national level, the Participatory Budget Process was expanded further this year during the budget preparations. Through this process, select national agencies and government-owned or -controlled corporations (GOCCs) coordinated with CSOs in assessing the effectiveness of proposed programs and forged Budget Partnership Agreements with the CSOs in their respective budget preparation activities.

Agencies and GOCCs that participated in this process in 2011 were the Departments of Education, Health, Social Welfare and Development, Public Works and Highways, Agriculture, Agrarian Reform, National Food Authority, National Housing Authority and National Home Mortgage and Finance Corp.

This year, DBM increased the number of participating agencies and GOCCs to include the Departments of Transportation and Communications, Tourism, Environment and Natural Resources, Labor and Employment, Justice, the Interior and Local Government, National Irrigation Authority, National Electrification Authority and the Light Rail Transit Authority. -Max V. de Leon / Reporter, Businessmirror