MANILA—Government should leave the accounting of the salary budgets of Constitutional offices to the Commission on Audit (COA), Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile said Friday.

Senator Franklin Drilon, chair of the Senate finance committee, and Budget Secretary Florencio Abad have agreed to exempt offices granted fiscal autonomy by the Constitution from keeping money for unfilled positions in the Miscellaneous Personnel Benefits Fund. In exchange, however, the offices would be required to submit quarterly reports on their spending.

But Enrile said that is still a form of control.

“With due respect, we are not under the control of the Executive,” he said.

He said the government already has a system in place to check for anomalous spending and questionable purchases. “That is why we have an audit office,” he said.

Constitutional offices—COA, Commission on Human Rights, Civil Service Commission, the Office of the Ombudsman, Congress, and the judiciary—are granted fiscal autonomy by the 1987 Constitution. Under Section 5, Article IX of the Constitution, appropriations “shall be automatically and regularly released.”

The Constitutional offices, particularly the Supreme Court, said a proposal by the Budget department to keep money for unfilled positions in the MPBF until they fill vacancies would violate their fiscal autonomy.

“This has been resolved already,” he said, a day after Chief Justice Renato Corona criticized both Malacanang and Congress at a convention of the Philippine Judges Association (PJA). Corona said the executive and legislative branches were trying to undermine the judiciary’s independence by putting its money in the

MPBF and threatening to impeach justices over a recent reversal on a case involving Philippine Airlines

and flight attendants retrenched in 1998.

The Supreme Court had initially voted in favor of the Flight Attendants’ and Stewards’ Association of the Philippines, but reversed this in a decision by the Supreme Court en banc.

“It’s time to stop (this fighting),” Enrile said.

Enrile is opposed to putting budgets of Constitutional offices under the MPBF. “It is not proper for the executive to control the budget of a co-equal branch,” he said. (Jonathan de Santos/Sunnex)