A party-list lawmaker has urged Congress to fix a “gray area” in the utilization of the accumulated P113.4-billion Motor Vehicle Users Charge or road users’ tax as this may have resulted in revenue losses due to corruption.
In a privilege speech, Coop-NATCCO Rep. Anthony Bravo said that since 2000, the Department of Public Works and Highways and then Department of Transportation and Communications failed to account for the tax fund as this did not pass through congressional scrutiny.
Even in the 2017 national budget, Bravo said the expenditures under MVUC were placed in a special fund “without details.”
“Is there a report on the breakdown of this MVUC funds? Is there full disclosure of all the transactions? Sadly, there is none,” Bravo said.
“I fear that huge part of the MVUC funds is lost to graft and corruption as there is no check and balance in place for this public fund. So how do we make the Road Board, DPWH and DoTC accountable?” he added.
At present, he said, the MVUC fund could not be properly reviewed by Congress because it is not reflected in the General Appropriations Bill.
“Under this prevailing condition, MVUC funds and releases could therefore be easily overlooked, or worse, concealed,” Bravo said. “This leaves us clueless if the fund is being properly dispensed according to its intended use. It deprives Congress of its control of the expenditures of this particular public fund.”
“Let us explore this gray area. It is high time that we take closer scrutiny of the expenditures of the DPWH and DoTC, relative to the utilization of the MVUC funds so as to stop further wastage of public funds,” the lawmaker added.
The MVUC, he said, is the third largest source of tax revenue in the country with P11.3-billion collections in 2015 alone, as reflected in the Budget Expenditures and Sources of Financing (BESF) for 2017.
The MVUC accounts for 88 percent of the total vehicle registration fee paid to the Land Transportation Office and was intended to finance the road maintenance projects.
Bravo said some 80 percent of the MVUC fund goes to Special Road Support fund under the DPWH to be used for national primary roads and national secondary roads while five percent goes to the Special Local Road fund also under DPWH to be used for local roads’ traffic and safety devices.
The remaining 15 percent is split equally between the Special Road Safety Fund, again under DPWH, for installation of road safety devices throughout the country and the Special Pollution Fund under the transportation department for prevention and control of air pollution from mobile sources.
Total MVUC collections in a span of five years has reached P27.5 billion, Bravo said.
In the latest audit for 2015, COA reported that fund transfers to various national government agencies and local government units reaching P1.1 billion remained unliquidated.
COA said noted that unrecorded purchases and issuances of inventories and direct recording of unissued inventories as expenses resulted in an overstatement of reported assets by P2.4 million.
COA also found out that 146 projects covered by additional allotment were not included in the MVUC reports.