President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has acknowledged the potential of blockchain technology in enhancing data transparency in the national budget and government projects.
In the first part of the fifth episode of the BBM Podcast aired on Monday, Marcos was asked whether blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are among the solutions to ensure that future budgets are free of these insertions and anomalies.
‘I haven’t seen any AI that is specifically geared towards that. Blockchain is something that could work,’ he responded.
‘However, what has happened has been that we have violated the rules. Those rules exist and simply we don’t. In the last decade, they stopped following the rules,’ he also said.
Blockchain technology is a decentralized and immutable digital ledger that records transactions in blocks, linked chronologically in a chain, creating a shared, tamper-proof database stored across multiple computers in a network.
During last week’s hearing of the Committee on Science and Technology, Sen. Bam Aquino pushed for the proposed Senate Bill No. 1330, also known as the Philippine National Budget Blockchain Act, stating that it will strengthen collaboration among the executive and legislative branches of the government, as well as with other groups.
‘Through blockchain, all budget transactions become transparent, immutable, auditable, and accessible to citizens in real time,’ said Aquino.
‘To put our national budget on the blockchain answers many concerns and issues with our current system, where there are insertions and ghost projects. The public can see how people’s money is spent, he added.