An Act Appropriating Funds for the Operation of the Bangsamoro Government from January One to December Thirty-One, Two Thousand and Twenty-Three and for Other Purposes

This is the region's budget for 2023 — ₱85,359,315,687.00, drawn from the annual block grant, other subsidies from the National Government, the region's share of national taxes collected inside its territory, unutilized prior years' appropriations sitting in the Bangsamoro Treasury, and projected collections on its own taxes and fees. The published volume carries a theme on its cover: “Optimizing the budget towards a transformative Bangsamoro”.

It funds 17 ministries, 11 other executive offices and 5 special purpose funds. The Bangsamoro Transition Authority receives ₱3,939,145,853, about 4.6% of the total. The Special Development Fund holds steady at ₱5,000,000,000, the Local Government Support Fund grows to ₱2,297,491,000, and the Miscellaneous Personnel Benefit Fund jumps to ₱2,615,269,253 — nearly 4 times what it was the year before.

The last 24 pages carry 73 sections of general provisions, and three of them are new and genuinely consequential.

Section 18 requires every ministry to buy its common-use supplies through the Procurement Service rather than on its own. Section 21 caps engineering and administrative overhead at 1% of project funds, and only for infrastructure costing more than ₱1,000,000. And Section 50 closes a gap that had been open since the first budget: money transferred from one agency to another, or out to a local government, is no longer “disbursed” at the moment of transfer. It counts only when it has “actually been utilized to pay for completed construction, goods delivered and services rendered, inspected and accepted within the validity period”.

The familiar rules carry over. Personnel Services across government may not exceed 45% of total revenue. At least 5% of every ministry's budget goes to a Gender and Development Plan. Deductions may never reduce an employee's monthly net take-home pay below ₱5,000. Infrastructure contracts, winning bidders and final costs must be published within 30 days, and officials who miss their quarterly reports have their salaries suspended automatically until they comply.

The Bangsamoro Government needs an annual appropriations act to function. This was the first budget of the Parliament reconstituted after the transition period was extended, sitting in a First Regular Session begun on 15 September 2022. It was passed on 20 December 2022 and signed by the Chief Minister on 22 December, 9 days before it took effect.

The theme printed on the cover is “Optimizing the budget towards a transformative Bangsamoro”, and for once the general provisions bear the slogan out — but the optimisation is aimed inward, at the government's own accounting.

Section 50 is the change that matters. Since the first budget, a ministry could move money to another agency or to a local government and treat it as disbursed. From this act on it cannot: the transfer counts only when the money has “actually been utilized to pay for completed construction, goods delivered and services rendered, inspected and accepted within the validity period”. That single sentence turns a paper transfer into a real one, and it is the sort of provision that only gets written after somebody has noticed the reported disbursement rate and the delivered-project rate diverging. Section 21's new 1% ceiling on engineering and administrative overhead, and Section 18's requirement to buy common-use supplies through the Procurement Service rather than agency by agency, point the same way.

Parliament's own line is where the tension sits. Of the ₱3,093,405,532 in its Operations budget, the act itemises ₱1,026,816,000 for Representations/Constituency Building, ₱267,840,000 for Special Legislature Activities, ₱120,000,000 for Community Upliftment and ₱104,544,000 for Oversight, against ₱364,640,000 labeled Legislation — with ₱1,159,565,532 of Personnel Services left undistributed across all of them. The categories that are not lawmaking outweigh the one that is, in the itemised portion, by roughly 4 to 1. Constituency service is real work and every legislature funds it, but a budget themed on optimisation itemising its own representation line four times larger than its legislation line is a proportion worth stating plainly.

The Miscellaneous Personnel Benefit Fund nearly quadruples, from ₱663,300,922.35 to ₱2,615,269,253 — a fund for salary deficiencies and positions in offices not yet filled, growing much faster than the budget as a whole. And Section 51, headed “Retention or Deduction of Funds”, still contains no sentence forbidding retention or deduction; that sentence does not enter a Bangsamoro budget until FY 2025.

Section 44 keeps the provision that has run unchanged since the first budget: hazard duty pay only for personnel in “strife-torn or embattled areas as may be determined and certified by the Secretary of National Defense”. This is the last budget to carry it. From FY 2024 the provision simply disappears, with no repealing clause and no explanation.