Government officials, members of civil society organization workers, academic experts, business people and international development agencies met on Saturday November 20 in Pasig City to sign an agreement in a bid to make government budgets more open.

In one of her brief meetings with the Philippine Public Transparency Reporting Project, the late public service icon Emilia Boncodin emphasized the need for the people to understand and have a say on how our country’s national budget is planned and spent.

The Philippine Public Transparency Reporting Project (PPTRP) and the Social Watch Philippines (SWP) jointly organized a media seminar on the Philippine budget October 21 at the Discovery Suites in Pasig City.

The seminar gathered journalists from GMANews.TV, UNTV, Inquirer, Vera Files, BusinessWorld, Business Mirror, the Catbalogan-based Samarnews.com, the Kidapawan-based dxCA Charm Radio, as well as media development organizations and PPTRP partners National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and Center for Community Journalism and Development (CCJD). Representatives from anti-corruption and governance groups such as the Transparency and Accountability Network, Rice Watch Network, and E-Net Philippines, as well as those of the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) also took part in the training.

Yvonne Chua, writer and trustee of Vera Files, discussed the role and responsibility of the media in reporting budget issues. She emphasized that budget itself is very important but the media loses its audience when reporting this “because we don’t understand the budget process ourselves.”

Chua provided tips on how to better write and report budget stories, addressing reasons why budget reporting has become frightening for many journalists to write and explain. “A reporter must not be afraid of numbers, and more importantly, dig deeper into contracts, its vulnerabilities and irregularities, and show and explain details,” Chua said.

SWP lead convenor Leonor Magtolis Briones provided inputs on development, politics and participation in government budgeting. She said that budget legislation is the most spectacular phase in the budget process yet it is not as open and as transparent as the public perceived. The budget calls of the Department of Budget and Management are more important because it is here when policies are set, the former national treasurer said.

Magtolis also emphasized the “natural” partnership between media and civil society organizations in monitoring and reporting on the government budget process. “While CSOs have extensive experience in participatory budgeting, media can give their support by transmitting their advocacies to the public,” she said.

Prof. Alvic Padilla of the UP National College of Public Administration and Governance discussed transparency accountability challenges in the national budget preparation and authorization.

Senator Teofisto “TG” Guingona told the participants how the budget process has become a political exercise. He also showed how loopholes in the budget can lead to corruption and misappropriation. The newly elected senator is calling on different branches of government and CSOs to work together to promote a more open budget system.

Mercy Ferrer of Healthcare without Harm shared her group's experience on lobbying for a budget for their advocacy on non-mercurial thermometers and autoclaves. Annalyn Sevilla, public financial management specialist, discussed budget execution and control, including important financial reports to look for to keep track of spending.

At the end of the seminar, the participants suggested to have a follow-through seminar to better train journalists on budget reporting. They also suggested to include editors and publishers, the so-called “gatekeepers” or the ones who decide on what gets published – or not – in the media.

Trumpeting an agenda of fighting the country's perennial problem on corruption, the Aquino administration claims it has laid out several programs to walk the talk. One of these programs is the adoption of the so-called "zero-based budgeting" (ZBB) system.

It may be recalled that in his first State of the Nation Address (SONA) in July last year, President Benigno Aquino III vowed to shift from the old "incremental" system of budgeting to the ZBB approach. The latter, he said, would substantially reduce, if not totally eliminate, money spent on unnecessary projects or programs, as well as money lost to corruption.

Without doubt, signing the 2011 budget into law before January 1 was a major achievement for the Aquino administration. As many news organizations have pointed out, it was the first time in 11 years the budget was passed in time. This does away with the need to implement a re-enacted budget which is effectively a license to misappropriate huge amounts of public funds if a government is so-minded. As we know, a re-enacted budget is when no new budget has been passed in time and thus the previous year’s budget is adopted again as the basis for the coming year’s spending – this despite the fact that substantial amounts will have been budgeted and used for infrastructure, capital costs and other one-off completed projects which will not be needed again. Re-enacted budgets also fail to reflect increased costs such as those related to inflation and possible rising government liabilities such as increasing pension costs and servicing a larger public debt. Such budgets result in endless accounting problems and subvert all efforts to ensure real transparency and accountability. In doing away with the need for a re-enacted budget – for this year at least – the Aquino government has secured a substantial victory and his team deserves full credit for it.

Huge allocations in the government's annual budget for so-called special purpose funds (SPFs) have been questioned and criticized time and again, although not enough it seems to put an end to the practice or at the very least inject some much-needed transparency into their use.

Nonetheless, the Aquino administration, which has just celebrated its first 100 days, has claimed it will address the issue of SPFs as part of its key reforms in the budget process.