THE Aquino administration reverted to a budget surplus in August despite its efforts to accelerate spending and make up for the tight purse strings in the first half of the year.
In a statement, the Department of Finance on Thursday said the government posted a surplus of P9.220 billion last month, or at least seven times more than the P1.3 billion recorded during the same month last year.

Because of this, the P43.713-billion budget gap at end-July narrowed to P34.493 billion at end-August, way below the government’s P82 billion programmed deficit for the third quarter of the year.

The government programmed a full-year deficit of P320 billion, but the Department of Budget and Management had said that this may no longer be attained given the lower shortfall sustained during the previous months.

“The result was achieved through increased revenue collections from the Bureaus of Internal Revenue and Customs, posting August increases of 11.17 percent and 24.72 percent, respectively. This, of course, was also notwithstanding the increase in actual disbursements in the month of August as the Aquino administration’s catch-up spending plan speeds up,” Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said.

August expenditures rose 8 percent year-on-year to P114.92 billion.

This brought the eight-month spending to P947.24 billion, still 8 percent behind the P1.030 trillion of last year.

Excluding interest payments, the government recorded a primary surplus of P162.114 billion at end-August or a reverse of the primary deficit recorded last year.

Revenues last month reached P124.148 billion as the BIR and BOC contributed P87.928 billion and P22.152 billion, respectively.

The August performance increased year-to-date revenues to P912.75 billion, with the BIR accounting for P619.7 billion and the BOC P171.9 billion, for year-on-year improvements of 13.42 percent and 0.74 percent, respectively.

Purisima expects the revenue performance of the BOC to improve given the onset of the holiday season.

“We expect Customs collections to continuously pick up, especially at the onset of the holiday season that is hopefully enough to offset ‘negative factors’ such as the high utilization of tax credit certificates, peso appreciation and reduced or zero duties on nearly 2,000 products in compliance with various international free trade agreements,” he said.

“Rest assured that we will continue on improving our tax administration in a bid to scoop in more revenues for public spending,” he added.