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Friday, March 29, 2024

Bersamin defends CIF budget, cites need to be ‘flexible’

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Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin in a Senate hearing defended the proposed P4.5 billion for confidential and intelligence funds (CIF) of the Office of the President (OP) for 2023, saying the presented administration “retained the confidential funds allotted for the OP” during the previous administration.

During the finance committee hearing on the proposed OP budget, Bersamin also  explained “the need to be flexible with the budget to be responsive to the requirements of international and domestic security.”

“We have adopted a whole of nation approach in respect of our security arrangements as well as our concern for internal as well as international security and this whole of nation approach requires us to have some flexibility…,” Bersamin, quoted by a GMA News report, said.

“We have not increased too much what the last administration had as far as this CIF is concerned, we just had replicated it and the reason there is probably that in a post-pandemic world, we would need a higher response or we need to be more responsive to the requirements of international and domestic security,” he said.

Bersamin further said “ee are not yet into that time when we can view it in the way most sectors of our society view it but it is not a simple view that we have about this. We want to be ready whenever there will be these exigencies that will arise so minaintain na lang po namin ‘yung amount ng CIF that was in effect under the former administration.”

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Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III in the Senate hearing inquired why the confidential and intelligence funds of the previous administration were retained as he asked if this is consistent with President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s 2022-2028 medium-term fiscal framework (MTFF), GMA News also reported.

Pimentel said he noticed that out of the total budget, “P4.5 (billion) of this will be confidential and intelligence funds, that’s almost 50% or close to 50%… why did we maintain, ES, the level of the former administration’s confidential and intelligence funds?”

“So, if we maintain a P4.5 billion confidential and intelligence funds in a single office, are we being consistent with that office’s medium statement of a medium-term fiscal framework?” Pimentel added.

Senior Deputy Executive Secretary Hubert Guevara, for his part, said the budget was retained in pursuit of the said framework.

The present administration designed the 2022-2028 medium-term framework to attain short-term macro-fiscal stability while remaining supportive of the economic recovery and promoting medium-term fiscal sustainability.

“To address that question, while I agree that the President has these plans, it should not also distract us from the fact that the confidential and intelligence funds are much-needed in pursuit of these plans as well,” Guevara, in the GMA News report, said.

The government earlier said confidential expenses are those related to surveillance activities in civilian government agencies that are intended to support the mandate or operations of the agency. 

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