Gov. Benigno R. Fitial\u2019s fiscal year 2011 report to the Legislature showed that the Legislature overspent almost $1 million in \u201cpersonnel\u201d but offset it with a surplus of almost the same amount in \u201call others\u201d or \u201coperations\u201d expense for a total deficit of $11,156. <\/p>\n
But there\u2019s more to this than what some lawmakers tried to explain yesterday as the Legislature has been crafting its budget bill in such a way that actual total \u201cpersonnel\u201d spending is almost split between \u201cpersonnel\u201d and \u201coperations,\u201d so when it\u2019s reporting time, the Legislature would almost always have overspending in personnel.<\/p>\n
Lt. Gov. Eloy S. Inos said the governor\u2019s report on a deficit or variance of $931,101 in the Legislature\u2019s personnel spending is accurate.<\/p>\n
For fiscal year 2011, the Legislature\u2019s personnel allotment was only for over $2.5 million, but actually spent over $3.4 million. This was in the governor\u2019s report. Fitial revised the 2011 budget from $132 million to $122 million because of declining revenues.<\/p>\n
Inos said what the Legislature did when it crafted the fiscal year 2011 budget was to identify a total of 145 fulltime employees for both the House and Senate, but budgeted these under the \u201coperations,\u201d not under \u201cpersonnel.\u201d<\/p>\n
The only entities budgeted under \u201cpersonnel\u201d are the 29 lawmakers whose salaries are constitutionally protected, along with the Legislative Bureau and the CNMI Youth Congress. <\/p>\n
The budget for the other 145 FTEs\u2014100 from the House and 45 from the Senate\u2014are in \u201coperations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have over 100 FTEs, meaning they plan to hire these people but put the spending under operations. That\u2019s because they don\u2019t want to inflate their personnel spending. So where are the people getting paid? From the operations,\u201d one administration official said.<\/p>\n
Inos, meanwhile, said \u201cthe correct procedure will be to reprogram \u2018all others\u2019 into personnel.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the way to resolve the appearance of that report\u2026the previous years were just like that,\u201d Inos told reporters. He said the administration has been pointing this out to the Legislature.<\/p>\n
Because of questions on the Legislature\u2019s budget and spending, some lawmakers questioned yesterday why the Legislative Bureau continues to have an 80-hour work biweekly while many other government employees are subjected to 64 hours.<\/p>\n
House Speaker Eli Cabrera (R-Saipan) told reporters to leave his conference room after calling them in, purportedly to explain the Legislature\u2019s fiscal year 2011 spending. <\/p>\n
It was only yesterday that the House called for a leadership meeting, days after receiving the governor\u2019s financial report on Dec. 31. Moreover, most House members have yet to fully review the financial report as of yesterday.<\/p>\n
Senate President Paul Manglona (Ind-Rota), meanwhile, said he\u2019s confident that the Legislature didn\u2019t overrun on personnel costs. He said even if the Legislature wants to spend the amount it wants, it cannot do so unless the Department of Finance approves and cuts the check.<\/p>\n
Manglona said they would seek clarification from the administration.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course when something like this, almost $1 million overrun showing in the report, it\u2019s very alarming. In times when we have to cut budget across the board, and the departments are really running at skeletal level, we need to be concerned, I guess we need to know why the numbers are coming out this way but again I\u2019m confident we didn\u2019t overrun,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In the end, he said it could only be a matter of sitting down together and understanding why the financial report came out the way it did.<\/p>\n
The governor said there was a total of $4.176 million in excess spending just for personnel in fiscal year 2011. This contributed to a total deficit of $25.8 million\u2014a combination of over $25.2 million in overspending and over half a million in revenue shortfall. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Gov. Benigno R. Fitial\u2019s fiscal year 2011 report to the Legislature showed that the Legislature overspent almost $1 million in \u201cpersonnel\u201d but offset it with a surplus of almost the same amount in \u201call others\u201d or \u201coperations\u201d expense for a total deficit of $11,156. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}