An Act Authorizing the Continued Use of Funds for the Settlement of Unpaid Obligations of FY 2020 and 2021 and Extending the Validity of FY 2022 and 2023 Appropriations an Act Authorizing the Continued Use of Funds for the Settlement of Unpaid Obligations of FY 2020 and 2021 and Extending the Validity of FY 2022 and 2023 Appropriations

This authorises the continued use of funds to settle unpaid obligations from fiscal years 2020 and 2021, and extends the validity of the 2022 and 2023 appropriations.

What makes it the document to read in this sequence is not the operative text but the explanatory note, which is the only place in the registry where the region sets out, in order, why its budgets keep needing rescue.

The note begins with Executive Order No. 91 of 2019, which moved the whole country from obligation-based budgeting to a Cash Budgeting System — appropriations to be spent within their own year, so that programs move faster and goods reach people sooner. Then the pandemic, which interrupted the functions of every agency, including the spending of their budgets. The note then lists what the national government did about it: Republic Act No. 11464 extending the 2019 appropriations into 2020, RA 11520 extending 2020 into 2021, and RA 11640 extending 2021 into 2022 — after which the 2022 and 2023 national budgets were simply written with 2-year availability from the start.

The region's own chain follows: BAA 24 extending 2020 and 2021 funds, BAA 33 extending 2022, and BAA 32, the 2023 budget, with its own graded deadlines for infrastructure and for operating expenses.

And then the note makes an argument against the reform itself. Citing the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, it observes that cash-based budgeting can pose major problems for developing countries and transition economies, which "may not have the administrative capacity or other pre-requisites needed for the effective introduction" of such a reform. It names the region's own causes of delay: a government in transition, an area undergoing major reforms as it emerges from decades of violent conflict, natural calamities, right-of-way problems, and the prohibitions that apply during electoral exercises.

The note's case is that the mismatch is structural rather than administrative. A cash budgeting system assumes an agency can plan, procure, build and pay inside 12 months. A region rebuilding its entire government while recovering from conflict, on ground where right-of-way disputes and calamities are ordinary and where election periods freeze public works, cannot reliably do that — and the national government, facing a milder version of the same problem, responded by legislating 2-year availability into its own budgets.

So the bill is not asking for an indulgence. It is arguing that the deadline was set by a reform designed for a different kind of administration, and that the region should be measured against what it can actually execute.

This is the explanatory note that explains the other 4. Bills 127, 128, 265 and 266 each move a date in a budget law and say nothing about why; this one lays out the whole chain — EO 91, the pandemic, 3 national extension statutes, the region's BAA 24, 32 and 33 — and then does something unusual for a government bill. It cites research against the policy its own government is implementing. The Philippine Institute for Development Studies warning that cash-based budgeting may not suit developing and transition economies lacking administrative capacity is, in a cabinet bill, an admission dressed as a citation.

The list of causes is worth keeping, because it is specific where such lists are usually generic: a government still being built, an area emerging from decades of violent conflict, natural calamities, right-of-way problems, and the prohibitions that attach to election periods. Every one of those is a reason a project cannot be completed in the calendar year it was funded in, and none of them is the kind of thing a budget reform designed in Manila would have priced in.

Enacted as BAA 38. What the sequence shows, read end to end, is a region that adopted a national fiscal reform, could not meet it, and legislated its way around it 5 times — and, in this one document, said clearly that the reform was the wrong fit rather than that the government had failed.