Welcome Address by Usec. Laura B.

Pascua Post-Evaluation Seminar on NBC 532 Review April 3, 2013 The Bayleaf Intramuros Manila

Good morning, everyone! Firstly, I would like to congratulate all of you in the BMBs for the work that you have done in the review of the NBC 532 submissions throughout all its stages, covering all the departments and agencies in the national government, including SUCs, the Judiciary and Congress. It has been over a year since we issued NBC 532 in December, 2011, and we are finally able to finish the review (or almost finish it as I understand that only a few agencies remain to be finalized) for all agencies including those that did not submit, for whatever reason. I can only surmise that some agencies may be still less confident about revising their OPIFs for lack of a thorough understanding of the concept and methodologies of OPIF, or they may not be getting the necessary support from their top management, or they may simply not realize that we are now very serious about mainstreaming OPIF in the budget process. Whatever the reasons, I believe that performance budgeting which we are pursuing mainly through the OPIF will stay for good and will remain as one of the irreversible reforms of our public expenditure management system and the sooner our client agencies realize this, the better for all of us. The review exercise might have taken longer than expected and eaten up a substantial amount of your time, effort and patience, competing as it did with your other work. But looking at the finished product, meaning the final and revised MFOs and PIs as well as the restructured PAPs should be a source of pride and a sense of accomplishment, for all you. Why dont we give ourselves a big hand. I guess you will all agree and I can see from where I sit that it wasnt easy. Let me quote Dr. Samuel Johnson who said What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence. Surely you have given your own share of diligence in the completion of the review. In the process you started to get a feel of it, how the review should be done, how to negotiate with and advocate to the agencies the most appropriate performance indicators given their MFOs as anchored in their respective mandates. And as Ive been told, the 532 exercise came as a sort of surprise to both our people and their agency counterparts that up to now they are still not very sure about what exactly the agencies mandates are, which is the first step to determining what an agency MFOs should be. But dont be discouraged that what youve done is far from perfect. We know that as in the other reforms we are pushing, it will always be work in progress, and we learn by doing, but

what I am sure is that from here on you will always improve on your previous work now that we are on the right trajectory, so to speak. Secondly, I cannot overemphasize the importance of this exercise in the CY 2014 budget preparation activities. Amidst all the reforms we are currently undertaking, we are reminded that these are all to facilitate the crafting of a national budget that is performance-based or performance-informed. Just to mention an aspect of the budget preparation work that is I guess giving sleepless nights to our IT people who are scrambling to put the OSBP system on fully operational status, the encoding and testing requirements of this new system is being done while our BMBs are also scrambling with the finalization of the departments/agencies OPIFs to ensure this. The restructured PAPs and the revised PIs are crucial inputs into our database system for the type of budget we want to provide for the whole of government. In addition, these revised PIs could be the basis for FY 2013 performance or PBB targets. But more than the IT platform that will give a big boost to performance budgeting in 2014, what we have here are the policy, methodological and technical platforms that have been there since OPIF was introduced in the early 2000 and which was only waiting to be harnessed and used in the budget process. The OPIF is a powerful tool to achieving a performance-oriented budget where result-focus allows for a programmatic approach to budgeting or a shift from detailed line-items to outputs and outcomes. This will allow greater managerial flexibility in financial decision-making and clear accountability arrangements for outputs and outcomes. More importantly, now that we are going full blast on performance budgeting in 2014, OPIF is a ready instrument for gathering reliable and comprehensive performance information to serve as a backbone of a performance-informed budget and a performance-based incentive system. Thirdly, this post-evaluation seminar on NBC 532 intends to draw lessons from your experience, to identify them and to use them in the next steps that we are committed to make. It is good opportunity for taking stock of the BMBs capacity for and commitment to the review process now and in the future and see where we can make the necessary interventions. How proactive was each one of you in the actual review? How much time and energy did you give into the process? How far did you go out of your way to achieve the goals of the whole exercise? What major difficulties did you encounter? Lastly, this seminar should pave the way for the OPIF next steps, which CPRS will briefly outline at the close of todays seminar. We should make sure that the investments we put into this strategic activity will not go to waste. After every major undertaking, whether it is OPIF or something else, we need to crystallize in our mind the steps we need to take to move us forward in our reform efforts at performance budgeting. In this reform business, we should always be a step ahead. A logical next step is the linking of MFOs and PIs to sector outcome indicators, actually already an on-going NEDA-DBM initiative being supported by the Asian Development Bank. We hope to bring this harmonization effort to the next higher level. Thanks to ADB which has seen us through thick and thin in our OPIF journey, special mention to

Claudia Buentjen who has not lost faith in our capacity for moving this difficult reform, we at DBM have been able to get the necessary technical assistance and more importantly, the institutional support to get the NBC 532 exercise through, given all the constraints that we faced at the start. Towards the end, we continued to be accorded generous accommodation just so that this worthwhile and critical project will see its completion. Of course, we would also like to thank the international expert and sector experts who did their darn best throughout the whole review process, ensuring the quality of the DBM recommendation, assisting us in the OPIF workshops we conducted, including this one. It is but a fitting gesture to culminate a technical assistance grant with an activity that reviews what happened, takes notes of the lessons learned and paves the way for the next steps we are inevitably, invariably going to take. Once again, good morning and may we have a fruitful seminar. Thank you.