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Jan 12, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Kaieteur News – Politicians – including the President, the Vice President and any other Minister – should have a limited role in the preparatory work for the formulation of the country’s Budget. This preparatory work, which involves interrogating the Budget submissions made by ministries, government departments, agencies and regional administration, is a technical task which should be left to the technicians in the Office of the Budget.
The Office of the Budget is supposed to be constituted by highly trained, highly qualified and highly paid technical staff. They should be the ones doing any interrogation of the Budget submissions.
Politicians have been limited in questioning and interrogating public officials about their work. A subject Minister is allowed to question the proposals made by Budget agencies which fall under his or her jurisdiction. No one expects a Minister not to approve the submissions of his agency.
But to have the President, Vice President and other Ministers grilling public officials about their Budget submissions is not acceptable. To do this constitutes a breach of the divide between the policy-making aspects of government and the implementation of public administration which is undertaken by public servants and public officials.
No elected official should be involved in such a technical process. The work of Ministers is to set the policy and to provide the guidelines and parametres around which the Budget will be prepared. But the actual work of amending, altering and aggregating the various submissions by agencies is supposed to be done by technical staff within the Ministry of Finance which is responsible for the actual preparation of the Budget.
At present, the Ministry of Finance falls under the Office of the President. There is a Senior Minister responsible for Finance and this individual falls under the Office of the President.
Guyana’s system of government is still patterned after the British model. That model places ministerial responsibility for the preparation and presentation of the Budget in the hands of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But this responsibility is a political responsibility.
Under the British system the actual preparation of the Budget is done by the Treasury. Guyana’s equivalent of this is the Ministry of Finance. Within the Ministry of Finance it is the Office of the Budget which is responsibility for control of the Budget preparation process.
The Office of the Budget and the Budget agencies are guided by the Minister of Finance via a Circular which is issued prior to the respective Budget submissions. The Minister is required to issue a circular which includes a timetable for submissions, the fiscal and policy objectives and the fiscal policy objectives and priorities of the government and budget costing parametres to be used in determining the allocations to be made to budget agencies.
When the Office of the Budget is finished with its draft Budget, it sends this to the Minister for forwarding to Cabinet and within Cabinet it is the Minister who has to defend the numbers with the assistance of the Budget team.
But at the preparatory stage, no Minister, Vice President or President should be grilling public officials about their submissions. This not only constitutes micromanagement but it also renders secondary the role of technical officers whose jobs are to assess the submissions and to crunch the numbers.
The only stage at which a public official, in this instance the Head of a Budget Agency, is required to answer questions by elected officials is firstly within the National Assembly during the consideration of the Estimates of Expenditure. Answers to questions concerning the Budget agency is done through the Minister.
Secondly, the Budget agency prepares its submissions but the law requires that this be approved by the subject Minister before being forwarded to the Minister of Finance. However, there is no role outlined for the interrogating of these submissions and of the public officials who prepared them by any elected official outside of the subject Minister.
The Fiscal Management and Accountability Act requires that the Head of a budget agency shall provide to the Finance Secretary any information that is requested concerning the affairs of the budget agency for which that Head of a budget agency has responsibility.
There is no mention of any role for non-subject Ministers, the Vice President or the President in grilling Heads of Budget agencies or public officials during the preparatory stage of the Budget. (The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
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