By Ann Cuisia

I just spent one of my most productive 2 hours this week inside a Technical Working Group Committee chaired by the of Office of Sen Bam Aquino. It was a great opportunity to shine a light on salient points of the newly drafted bill where “blockchain” as a specific technology may be unknowingly hidden, only deconstructed.

The call to make government spending more transparent is long overdue and we know the urgency of this as victims of this scandalous decades-long corruptions. We are all desperate about making the government accountable. And accountability can only start when the entire budget cycle with 30+ processes are transparent. But transparency cannot be achieved by mandating a single technology. It must be built on principles that endure even as technologies change. This is the essence of the “Secure and Open the Budget Bill”, a proposal that secures public funds through openness, accountability, and citizen participation, without locking the government into costly, premature, or vendor-dependent solutions.

Here are five reasons why this bill is the smarter, more inclusive framework for national budget transparency.

1. Technology-neutral, not technology-mandated

Good governance defines outcomes, not tools.

The earlier “Blockchain the Budget” proposal risked hard-coding a specific technology into law which is a move that could quickly become obsolete or create monopolies disguised as transparency systems.

The Secure and Open the Budget Bill sets a different standard: it focuses on performance, interoperability, and verifiability. It requires that every peso spent by the government be traceable, digitally signed, and publicly auditable yet it leaves open how those outcomes are achieved. This protects innovation, reduces cost, and ensures the state remains free to adopt future technologies that are more efficient or more secure.

By mandating results, not buzzwords, the bill aligns governance with technological independence and fiscal prudence.

2. A real-time, tamper-evident National Budget Transparency Platform

Instead of building another blockchain-like “ledger,” the bill establishes a National Budget Transparency Platform (NBTP) - a living, interoperable portal that ties together all financial documents, transaction values, and audit data across agencies.

Through the NBTP, every citizen, journalist, or oversight body can view allocations, disbursements, and procurement data in real time, all digitally signed by responsible officials. The platform uses open data standards and open APIs so anyone can build verification or analytics tools around it.

Unlike abstract promises of “immutability,” this system achieves trust through traceability, digital signatures, and multi-institutional redundancy. Data is mirrored across independent systems run by universities, media institutions, and civil-society partners, ensuring no single entity, not even government, can alter the record undetected.

3. Data sovereignty and citizen ownership

Transpacy is meaningless if the data that proves accountability resides in private servers or foreign jurisdictions.

The bill enshrines data sovereignty as a legal right: all budgetary and financial data belong to the Filipino people and must be stored, processed, and safeguarded under Philippine jurisdiction. The Department of Budget and Management and the Commission on Audit are designated as data custodians, with strict requirements for local hosting, auditable access logs, and data portability to prevent vendor lock-in.

This provision protects the Philippines from external data dependence and from the quiet privatization of public information. It ensures that national transparency remains a public trust, not a commercial product.

4. Public oversight, not political control

Transparency must also apply to those managing the transparency system itself.

The bill creates a National Budget Watch Council (NBWC), a lean body composed only of key government agencies (DBM, DICT, COA, DOF) and three citizen experts from the private sector or academe with proven credentials in information technology or fiscal governance.