Cadastral survey to end exaggerated land claims by LGUs – DENR

MANILA, Philippines – Local units in Mindanao have been exaggerating the extent of their land areas in a bid to acquire bigger revenue allotments from the national government, Environment Secretary Jesus Paje warned senators on Monday.

But if Congress supported his department’s move to finish the cadastral survey of the entire country, the government could establish the correct land areas of all cities and municipalities and have a better basis for Internal Revenue Allotments (IRA).

The IRA is the money received by all LGUs from the national government.  Its amount is based on a local unit’s land area, population and tax collections remitted to the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

Paje lamented that the cadastral survey that the government initiated “a century ago” has not yet been completed until now.  There are still 5.6 million hectares all over the country that has not yet been subjected to a survey.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources is asking for P5 billion spread between 2012 and 2013 to fund this effort.

“If we check the (land area) submissions (from) some parts of Mindanao, the total hectarage of the Philippines (would be) 34 million when it is only 30,” Paje told reporters after the DENR’s first budget hearing in the Senate.

“Some (LGUs) do this to get a bigger IRA so we will definitely find that out (whether they are misleading us) if we do actual land survey,” he added.

Paje noted that DENR surveyors have been avoiding going to the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao in particular.

“They (surveyors) are met with armalites” by parties involved in land area misdeclaration, according to Sen. Franklin Drilon, Senate finance committee chairman.

Sen. Edgardo Angara warned the DENR during the budget hearing that “some barangays (villages) keep expanding and moving their mojon (markers) because of the allocation of IRA.”

“This has already resulted in conflicts.  The boundary disputes are not settled by courts but politically by the municipal councils, so the problem is perennial and unsolvable…We cannot leave this matter to politicians who want a larger IRA,” Angara said.

Drilon stressed the importance of the cadastral survey in determining the political boundaries of local governments as well as properties of private owners.

“One hundred years has passed by and still we have about 5.6 million hectares that have not been surveyed, have no boundaries and cannot be defined clearly,” he said in an impromptu press briefing after the budget hearing.

The senator blamed “the overlapping of boundaries” among at least five government bodies that he said aggravated the problem.

The Bureau of Lands, Department of Agrarian Reform, National Commission on Indigenous People, Land Registration Authority and local courts are involved in land titling and “therefore the possibility of overlapping of titles is always there,” according to Drilon.

Drilon said a request has been submitted to President Aquino for the issuance of an executive order “to refrain (the five) agencies from issuing titles while (the DENR is) threshing out this problem.”