Parliamentary Budget Office soon
Sri Lanka’s Parliament will soon set up a Parliamentary Budget Office for the first time since the country’s independence to provide independent analysis on the state of the nation’s finances.
Necessary legislation is now being finalised for the setting up of an Independent Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) and it will be presented in Parliament shortly to monitor the budget without depending on the Finance Ministry for details, Chairman of the Committee on Public Finance (COPF), T NA MP M. A. Sumanthiran told the Business Times.
The PBO’s advice will be independent, objective and non- partisan and open to other committees and parliamentarians and action will be taken to make it freely accessible to the public, he added.
The office will work with academics, think tanks, consulting firms and external experts to provide authoritative budget analysis.
Mr. Sumanthiran expressed the belief that they would be able to set up the PBO, after enacting the necessary legislation, in time to monitor the 2018 budget in November.
The role of parliamentarians in setting the budget and its implementation had expanded over a period of time. Parliament requires an independent source of information to improve their participation in budget preparation, he pointed out adding that PBO will fulfill this need.
The COPF report on ‘Assessment of the Fiscal, Financial and Economic Assumptions of the Budget 2017’ was presented to Parliament during the committee stage budget debate but it was not debated by MPs due to time constraints, he said.
He noted that no action has been taken on recommendations and observations made in the report as it was not taken up for debate in Parliament.
The COPF had found that the draft Budget Estimates 2017 presented to Parliament do not tally with the actual figures used by the Finance Ministry and there were discrepancies in figures with over and under estimates in revenue targets.
The 2017 Budget has over- estimated the tax revenue making the task of tax collection authorities ‘ challenging’ and in this context the government should consider additional measures if planned revenue didn’t come in, the COPF warned.
Finance Ministry has given a set of figures to COPF on November 2 which was not the basis on which the Finance Minister presented the 2017 Budget, he said, adding that another set of figures was given on November 12.
The COPF report was based on that new set of figures, which are not published as yet, he pointed out.
These matters could be rectified with the setting up of the PBO, he said, noting that it will provide transparency and accountab i l i t y, to enhance credibility and also to improve the budge t process.