Follow the peso

Reading it

Budget to buy with is the office’s maintenance and other operating expenses plus its capital outlay in that year’s General Appropriations Act. Salaries are left out: they are not bought through bidding. Put out to bid is the approved budget of every notice its offices posted that year; awarded is the contracts PhilGEPS records on them.

The three will not line up, and the gaps are not by themselves a problem:

• An office may bid out more than its own budget when it also carries out projects paid from special funds, as the Ministry of Public Works does for the infrastructure fund, or the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government for its local governance fund.
• A failed bidding posted again counts again, so a project re-bid twice is counted three times.
• Money appropriated in one year may be bid out the next; appropriations stay valid into the following year.
• Awards are only those PhilGEPS publishes by office, which leaves out most awards on its newer system. A small “awarded” figure is usually a gap in the record, not money unspent.
• Small purchases below the posting threshold never reach PhilGEPS at all.

Offices are matched by name: a ministry’s district and provincial offices on PhilGEPS all count toward it. The budget figures are the Acts’ own, from the Budget workspace; the notices are PhilGEPS’, as everywhere here. See Sources.