BEYOND the bloodsheds splurged in newspapers’ front-page stories, there’s one legislative initiative by boxing champ Sen. Manny Pacquiao and Navotas Rep. Tobias Tiangco, which needs immediate imprimatur from Malacañang. The proposed legislative measure is being endorsed by the Boracay Foundation, Inc. (BFI) led by Dr. Henry Chusuey and Dionisio Salme, chair and president, respectively.
Recently, the two legislators separately filed bills seeking to amend the law allowing power distributors to charge consumers for lost and stolen electricity.
In his bill’s the introduction, Tiangco underscored the need to “unburden the public from shouldering the cost of power losses it has nothing to do with” and to stop the practice by distributors of passing on the payables, known as systems losses, to consumers.
Systems losses result from “pilferage and inefficient transmission, both of which should be the responsibility of power distribution company or cooperative,” something that has never been legislatively cured in the past two decades.
Adding insult to injury, under the present law, customers are also required to pay the 12% value added tax, which imposes added obligation on ordinary households, over and above the systems loss they shoulder. This conundrum has long been discussed in Congress and debated endlessly in many forums, but the defect has not been seriously addressed by both the legislative and executive branches of government.
To-date, the country has the second highest power cost per kilowatt hour in Southeast Asia, a blatant insult to Filipino consumers. The legislative effort cure the defect of the law, however, should not just be limited to systems loss. Congress must also fix the profit ceiling of power firms to a single digit only. By doing so, power bills will be reasonably reduced.
To ordinary people, power bills go high because the process of getting electricity to homes involves three processes:
generation, transmission and distribution. Adding the cost of subsidies for missionary connections (unproductive lines) affect the mathematical power consumption computation.
“Laws governing power in the country should also be reviewed thoroughly with safety nets adopted to ensure that unwarranted charges are not passed on to users. And, if there are fiscal deficiencies from defective contracts the government signed with the private sector, the rate adjustments should not be against consumers. Let’s not pass the buck,” the BFI stressed. (Johnny Dayang)
