Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III today Sept. 12 voted ‘’no’’ to a concurrent resolution supporting the 2022-2028 Medium-Term Fiscal Framework (MTFF) of the national government.
Pimentel said voting in favor of this concurrent resolution ‘’is the complete antithesis of my role as the minority leader".
‘’To commit myself to the contents of the resolution and the attached MTFF is to abdicate my parliamentary duty to fiscalize and check the validity of proposals and ideas on the floor of the Senate on a case-to-case basis,’’ he pointed out.
‘’One last point. The subject resolution is replete with formal and procedural inaccuracies,’’ he added.
Pimentel said voting in favor of the resolution is a commitment from the voter to support the 21-page MTFF which ‘’contains macroeconomic objectives, fiscal plans, and legislative measures pre-determined by the Executive Branch".
He emphasised that an affirmative vote could amount to a wholesale surrender to the following legislative measures:
(1) Annual Budget or the General Appropriations Act;
(2) Budget Modernization Bill;
(3) National Government Rightsizing Program;
(4) Imposition of VAT on digital service providers;
(5) Taxation of income generated by online content
creators;
(6) Imposition of excise tax on single-use plastics;
(7) Government Pension Reform bills; and
(8) Other fiscal strengthening measures that are identified to complement the objectives of the MTFF.
‘’And all these lack sufficient details in the present form of the MTFF to support an intelligible and well-informed decision on the matter,’’ he pointed out.
‘’To commit myself to the contents of the resolution and the attached MTFF is to abdicate my parliamentary duty to fiscalize and check the validity of proposals and ideas on the floor of the Senate on a case-to-case basis,’’ he added.
"It is my position that this measure should not have followed the procedure for concurrent resolutions and that legislative work should have started at the committee level and not in plenary. If the chosen legislative form is inaccurate, the legislative procedure followed is wrong and, therefore, the result arrived at is defective,’’ he stressed.