67,000 jobs available in govt offices

PRESIDENT Benigno Aquino 3rd may very well address the problem of rising unemployment by filling up the 66,957 job vacancies in his own government.

During a recent hearing by the House Committee on Appropriations on the proposed P1.816-trillion national budget for 2012, Budget Secretary Florencio Abad disclosed that they would need P23.4 billion for the vacancies in a number of agencies and offices.

The P23.4 billion is part of the Miscellaneous Personnel Benefits Fund (MPBF), which will cover unfilled positions in constitutional commissions and offices enjoying fiscal autonomy, the military or uniformed personnel, educational institutions and hospitals.

It would be released upon submission of sufficient proof that personnel have been hired for these vacant slots.

In the Office of the Ombudsman alone, 51 percent of the plantilla are yet to be filled up, Abad said.

The constitutional commissions and offices enjoying fiscal autonomy would require a total P4.971 billion to fill up their vacant positions.

These include Congress (P281.693 million); the judiciary (P1.985 billion); the Civil Service Commission (P122.836 million); Commission on Audit (P1.851 billion); Commission on Elections (P162.341 million) and the Office of the Ombudsman (P567.793 million).

President Aquino’s proposed 2012 budget of P1.8 trillion allotted P593.3 billion for Personnel Services—a 9.8 percent increase compared with last year.

Of this amount, P23.4 billion will be used to support the final tranche of the Salary Standardization Law III and requirements for new teachers, uniformed personnel and other civil servants.

The increase in the Personnel Services budget was expected to lead to the hiring of 13,000 more teachers in 2012.

The country’s finance managers also recently were grilled by the senators on the government’s private-public partnership (PPP) program, which has not taken off despite a P12.5-billion budget allotted for it for 2011.

Abad said that the Aquino administration has allotted P22.94 billion for PPP projects for next year.

The P12.5 billion was broken down into: P5 billion for projects of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC), P5 billion for the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and P2.5 billion for the Department of Agriculture.

The P22.94-billion for PPP projects for 2012 will go to education, P5 billion; health, P3 billion; DOTC, P8.593 billion; DPWH, P3 billion and agriculture, P2.5 billion.

The senators discovered that the 2012 budget was actually P1.977 trillion, not P1.816 trillion as earlier reported.

Sen. Francis Escudero said that the PPP projects being peddled by the Aquino administration are no different from those mentioned in Republic Act 7718 or the Build-Operate-Transfer Law.

“PPP is only a slogan of this government,” he added. –JAIME PILAPIL AND LLANESCA T. PANTI REPORTERS, Manila Times