Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson on Wednesday, Aug. 13, pushed anew to make public the proponents of all amendments - including insertions - in the budget process.

Lacson, an eagle-eyed watchdog of the national budget, said this will make the proponents answerable for flood control and other infrastructure projects that turned out to be substandard or ghost projects.

Otherwise, he said Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 4, which was taken up in plenary on Tuesday, will not achieve its purpose of ensuring transparency in the deliberations of the 2026 budget.

"To truly ensure transparency in the national budget process, the identities of individual proponents of amendments aka insertions must also be made public, so they may be made answerable for substandard or ghost projects that they proposed in the crafting of the GAA. Otherwise, Senate Concurrent Resolution no. 4 will defeat its purpose," he said in a post on X Wednesday.

Lacson stressed this point during his interpellation of Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 4.

"We have to be able to identify sino ang proponent/s ng amendments (We have to identify who are the proponent/s of the amendment/s). Can we do that? We are for full transparency. The most genuine transparency is full transparency," he told Senate Finance Fommittee Chairman Sherwin Gatchalian, the sponsor of the resolution.

"Kung hindi rin full transparency, ayokong sabihing naglolokohan, pero hindi rin fully transparent. It will defeat the purpose. Because what we should identify, ang proponent kasi nandoon ang taguan. Pag di na-identify back to the proponent/s ng amendment/s, kanya-kanya tayong singitan na naman (If we don't have full transparency, I don't want to say we're just kidding each other, but we will not be fully transparent and it will defeat the purpose of the resolution. We should identify the proponent because 'pork' is being hidden there. If we don't trace amendments back to the proponents, this will allow questionable insertions all over again)," he added.

Lacson raised the issue after learning from Gatchalian that not all documents may be uploaded to the government's website under the concurrent resolution.

While Gatchalian said they may upload only the committee report and not the full amendments to avoid "complexity," Lacson said this would render the resolution worthless.

Lacson said that without full transparency, they can no longer identify the proponent of the  budget amendment. He noted that even in the second reading in the House, "may bulungan na (there are ongoing whispers)" and the amendments are not taken up in plenary.

"Ang hirap maghanap, mag-review sa budget deliberation, hirap na hirap kami ng staff namin pag naghahanap ako ng previous years’ budget napakahirap. Pero kung may record ako kanino galing ang amendment, mas madali hong maghanap. (It is hard to review amendments in budget deliberations. My staff and I have a hard time doing this when we scrutinize previous years' budgets. But if I had a record of who made what amendment, the amendments will be easier to track)," Lacson said.

"It’s not really difficult if we want to do it... If we upload all the amendments, even amendments to the amendments to the amendments, hindi mahirap i-upload yan Mr. President, especially written amendments (It's not really difficult if we want to do it. If we upload all the amendments, even amendments to the amendments, it's not hard to upload them, especially the written amendments)," he added, as he told Gatchalian that he was willing to help make it happen.