The Philippine Senate will push for continuous livestreaming and official transcripts as the bicameral conference committee, the panel that reconciles the House and Senate versions of the budget, takes up the proposed 2027 national budget, Senator Panfilo "Ping" M. Lacson said. The measures are intended to strengthen transparency and identify the lawmakers behind budget amendments and realignments, closing a gap at the stage of the process where individual responsibility for changes has historically been hardest to trace.

In an interview with DZMM radio on Sunday, Mr. Lacson said transcripts would allow the public to track who initiated changes to the budget bill, noting that bicameral proceedings have historically lacked recorded minutes. The bicam's reconciled text becomes the version both chambers vote to ratify, so records of its sessions largely determine how traceable any individual amendment remains.

"The bicam, it should be detailed with minutes, and the transcript must be recorded. This is the only bicameral conference for all measures that has no transcript. It is impossible to understand who introduced the amendment. There should already be one by now," he said in Filipino.

The Senate also plans to build on transparency measures introduced during deliberations on the 2026 budget, including identifying senators who proposed amendments and publishing proceedings on the chamber's website.

For this year's budget deliberations, Mr. Lacson said the chamber intends to invite budget advocacy groups, including the People's Budget Coalition, to observe the bicameral proceedings. He urged the groups to go beyond monitoring and publicly call out lawmakers responsible for questionable budget changes.

Mr. Lacson also warned against repeated project insertions at different stages of the budget process, describing the practice as a "double kill."

He added that senators would require infrastructure projects to comply with Department of Public Works and Highways guidelines, including the submission of programs of work, feasibility studies and geotagging information that ties each project to specific locations. He stressed that the Unified Account Code Structure, the government's standardized coding system for the national budget, must be retained throughout the budget process to ensure projects can be tracked during implementation. — Pexcel John Bacon

Source: BusinessWorld