The Philippines Public Financial Management (PFM) Committee through its Resolution No. 5-2023 dated January 26, 2024, requested the support of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to lead the 2024 Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) Assessment with supplementary PEFA frameworks for Gender- and Climate-Responsive PFM, and Disaster Resilient and Responsive PFM or the Philippines 2024 PEFA++ and DRR-PFM Assessment.
The 2024 PEFA assessment and two supplementary assessments for climate (+CRPFM), gender (+GRPFM) plus disaster risk management (+DRRPFM) responsive PFM, or the 2024 PEFA+++ assessment will be a multiframework and multi-stakeholder assessment aimed to provide the Philippines Government with a comprehensive up-to-date diagnostic of the performance of the PFM institutions, systems, and processes and inform the existence of any gaps against international practices. The assessment has three main objectives: (i) measuring PFM progress since the last PEFA assessment conducted in 2016; (ii) informing the midterm review of the PFM Reform Roadmap 2024-2028 and preparation of a detailed action plan; and (iii) support identify initiatives for harmonizing financial management arrangements and strengthen country systems for use in donor-funded projects.
A development partner (DP) working group, organized, and led by ADB and the PFM committee to ensure effective overall DP consultations for the PEFA+++ Assessment (the “PEFA+++ development partner working group”), will oversee and manage the activities, progress, and outputs of the consultant.
The purpose of these assessments are to apply the PEFA 2016 Framework and lead/coordinate the work of 2 other national consultants that will support the assessment and determine the extent to which the Philippines PFM system is ready to support and foster the implementation of the government development agenda. Additionally, the consultant will also be responsible for leading and coordinating the activities of the 6 consultants being engaged to conduct, in parallel and jointly, the Gender-Responsive Public Financial Management (PFM) assessment, the Climate-Responsive PFM assessment and the Disaster Resilient and Responsive PFM assessment.
Findings of the PEFA+++ assessment will inform whether Philippines laws and regulations, institutions, systems, procedures and processes contribute to the implementation of its socioeconomic development agenda, including gender, climate and disaster response, throughout the budget cycle, including the planning and design of budgetary policies, the budget allocations to ensure that these development policies are implemented as intended, and the monitoring and evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of these policies and investments.
Main outputs of the PEFA+++ will be one report for each of the assessments (totaling 4), identifying the scoring and the gaps against the international standards and practices and a list of recommendations/solutions to address the gaps and improve the scoring.
The focus of the assessment will be on the operations of the central government, including transfers to Government-Owned or -Controlled Corporations (GOCCs) and local government units (LGUs), and transparency of inter-governmental relations. Any dialogue and communication between the consultant and the government officials will be guided by the ADB.
The pefa-philippines.org platform is a content manager whose aim is to have a structured collaboration with the Philippines government to collect the information and documentation needed to assess the performance of the public financial management (PFM) system with the PEFA 2016 methodology.
This platform has been supplemented by the “gender” methodological framework to provide a gender- and climate-change-sensitive assessment of PFM, as well as a reference situation for the future and also by the DDR module.
This new PEFA assessment will also make it possible to measure the evolution of performance and the progress made in relation to the previous assessment (PEFA 2016) in order to serve as a basis for drawing up a public finance reform plan.
The data used to rate the indicators relating to this assessment cover fiscal years 2021-2022-2023. Some data relate to fiscal year 2024, notably for components that are to be assessed “at the time of the evaluation”. Information on budget preparation relates to the preparation of the 2024 budget.
The assessment of the performance of the Philippines PEFA++ assessments will be subject to the PEFA quality review process (PEFA check). The structures responsible for carrying out the peer review for this assessment are the Government, the PEFA Secretariat and at least two external reviewers. The reviewers will review the terms of reference, the initial draft report and the revised draft report on the basis of comments made on this platform.