Teno: ‘We will pay our obligations’

Gov. Pedro P. Tenorio yesterday said the government is not running away from its financial responsibilities, although it will take some time before it can settle the mounting debts it owes to both private and public vendors.

He said he has inherited these obligations from previous administration and that they are trying their best to meet them in time.

“That’s an obligation of the government and we have to look for funding to pay our accounts,” Tenorio told reporters in an interview. “We try to find resources so that we could pay our obligation.”

The NMI Retirement Fund has been asking the administration to pay more than $26 million in unpaid contributions for nearly 5,000 public sector employees incurred since June last year.

In addition, the Commonwealth Utilities Corporation has sent several appeals to the Department of Finance to make a payment schedule to settle close to $10 million in utility bills.

Aside from these, departments and agencies also owed several private vendors who have provided various services for the past few years.

While the governor has put in place austerity measures to tighten public spending since he began his term in January 1998, CNMI’s financial obligations continue to mount due to the economic difficulties confronting the island. The crisis has pulled down revenue collections for over two years now.

In a preliminary report of a single financial audit conducted by Deloitte & Touche for Fiscal Year 1998, the Commonwealth’s deficit has reached more than $80 million — a huge portion of it were spent during the administration of former Gov. Froilan C. Tenorio.

“Some people think that whenever we say austerity, they think that we are not serious about that,” Tenorio explained. “It’s very serious because we have obligations we have to pay and these obligations are not because of my own doing.”

Meanwhile, the governor said he favored comprehensive review of local retirement system, citing the need to come up with equitable share in the government’s contributions.

“The retirement system should be reviewed because if we continue to have this economic downfall, we don’t know how we can handle (it),” said Tenorio.

He noted that a plan to raise the contribution from 24 percent to 26 percent will be difficult for the government since it will be forced to seek other funding sources to meet such an obligation.

“Regardless how we are going to look at it… if they increase that for every salary that we pay that means, on top of that, we have to find about 26 percent (of the amount),” he added.