Attao expects revised budget reports

House Speaker Blas Jonathan T. Attao (R-Saipan) said the Legislature looks forward to working with the Torres administration in order to come up with a balanced budget for the operations of the CNMI government in fiscal year 2020, which begins on Oct. 1 this year.

Attao

The third-term lawmaker from Precinct 3 said that fiscal year 2020 may still be six months away but the Legislature already wants to start planning on how the government’s revenues will be distributed.

Attao said the Legislature wants to see a better picture of the government’s projected revenues and collection.

“We’re still waiting for the report from Finance and [Office of Management and Budget]. We cannot just make up numbers, we got to see the figures,” he said. However, because the CNMI just went through Super Typhoon Yutu, this early, the collections and anticipated projections for fiscal year 2019 have already dropped this early.

Yutu hit the islands in the last week of October 2018.

Attao said that revenue collection in the first quarter of the current fiscal year significantly dropped after Yutu, with economic activity limited to within the community and visitor arrivals stopped.

“We sustained a lot of damage from Yutu. And, coming up with the [fiscal year] 2020 budget is our main priority as the CNMI continues to recover. The funds of the government come from taxes, like the Business Gross Revenue Tax. We’re trying to revamp and revisit the [government’s finances], so we can protect the fiscal year 2020 budget.”

Attao said, in an event of an austerity measure, or worse, a partial government shutdown, they would look at funding essential sectors of the government first in order to keep it functioning. “That’s what we can do, like during the austerity days that we had in the past back in 2010 and even during the [partial government] shutdown.”

“In the shutdown, there were essential sections that…must remain open, like public health, public safety, and the public school system. There are preliminary ways of what they [administration] are considering of doing with the anticipation of the money that’s not in yet and our [first quarter] collections obviously down.”

He added that the money still being spent by the government is still part of the fiscal year 2019 budget and collections for the second quarter of the current fiscal year are still ongoing, ending on March 31.

“Hopefully, there won’t be any government shutdown. But the shutdown can only happen on Oct. 1 of the new fiscal year. Our [Legislature] job is to prevent that from happening. [Finance and OMB] will be submitting a revised [report] on April 1. If the third and fourth quarter [revenues] carry us through, then I’m optimistic that there will be another revised [report].

The House Ways and Means Committee has been tasked to look at the collection of the Division of Revenue and Taxation under the Department of Finance.