BAGUIO City posted a dismal eight percent fund utilization or only P79.96 million out of P1.023 billion available funding for development projects in 2022, the Commission on Audit revealed.
State auditors revealed that of the 539 programs, projects, and activities (PPAs) lined up and funded from 2019 to 2022, the city government of Baguio only reported 96 as “fully implemented” with another 96 listed as “partially implemented” and the remaining 347 “not implemented.”
“Development Projects prioritized by the City Government amounting to P943.46 million under the 20 percent Development Fund were not completed and/or implemented as of December 31, 2022, thus, socio-economic and environmental services were short of delivery,” the audit team said.
The 211-page audit report was received by the office of Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong last May 25, 2023.
Based on the breakdown provided in the audit report, fully implemented PPAs were valued at P79.96 million; partially implemented at P353.98 million, and unimplemented at P589.48 million.
“This translates to a measly 18 percent of the 539 PPAs prioritized by management. In terms of fund utilization, the amount utilized equates to only eight percent of the P1,023,419,961.09 total available funds for implementation in the current year,” auditors said.
The city government was cautioned that since the projects and programs were time-bound, failure to deliver them to Baguio’s residents might affect their relevance while creating backlogs in the workload of city bureaus and departments.
“The non-implementation and non-completion of the various development programs, projects, and activities on time, impede the delivery of basic services, may render the programs irrelevant, and would pile up the workload of implementing offices,” the COA added.
Responding to the audit observations, the city government agreed that there is a need for the re-evaluation of the 347 unimplemented PPAs to determine if their output would still be relevant to the needs of the people.
Likewise, it gave assurances that stricter monitoring of project timetables would be enforced to ensure the timely delivery of socio-economic services.
