During a 30 minute parlimentary discussion, when the rebalance of the budget for 2016. was adopted, the key weakest link that caused the necessity for amendements to the law on the budget was the so-called “compensation for mothers“. The representatives of the Ministry of Finance have accused the MPs for adopting the amendements of the Law on Social and Children Protection within a competely wrongful estimation of fiscal influence, which led to wrongful budget planning and the necessity for its rebalance.
Therefore, there is an impression that the rebalance is proposed only in order to increase social benefits, which are the Transfers for social protection.
However, by comparing the plan and the rebalance, one comes to a conclusion that all other categories of expenditures have increased. Therefore, current expenditures have increased for more than 31 million, transfers to institutions, individuals, non-governmental and public sector for 25 million, current budgetary reserve for more than 4 million.
The main reason for the rebelance that is rarely mentioned is the Law on Salaries in the Public Sector, since its completely wrong fiscal impact assesment misbalanced the state budget, and it also geopardised the budget of other subjects in the public sector, such as the local self-governments.
In that sense, the key point that needs to be the focus of attention is the gross salaries in the budget. Due to the Law on Salaries in the public sector, gross salaries for this year within the first version of the budget were planned for almost 34 million more than in 2015. With the rebalance, the gross salaries are increased for additional 19 million.
The announcmenets of the then Minister of Finance included that the budget influence will be around 13 million. In addition to that, noone even tried to foresee the influence of the law on the budgets of other parts of the public sector, local self-governments, regulatory agencies, entreprises and public institutions.
Therefore, we conclude that the ability of fiscal impact assessement of the legislation is not on an excellent level even in the Governement, and particulary in the Ministry of Finance, which was exclusively resposnsible for the Law on Salaries.
During the speedy discussion on rebalance in the Parliament, the necessity of the presentation of the budgetary documents to the MPs in an electronic form was mentioned. We wholehartedly support this idea, as we formally filed an initiative to the Ministry of Finance two years ago. The presentation of budgetary information to the MPs and the public in a machine readable form would facilitate the data analysis and would provide a possibility to the citizens to make their own conclusions on what is happening with the budget, besides official explanation. This year, we did it for you:
