Monitoring Report on the Transparency and Accountability of The Budget Users

Trenovski, Borce (2014): Monitoring Report on the Transparency and Accountability of The Budget Users. Published in: Center for Economic Analyses – CEA (research monograph) No. ISBN 978-608-4731-16-0 : pp. 1-40.

Abstract

We begin this note to you with two citations that reflect our understanding of what public money and public spending is, and why in a democratic society it is necessary the information available to the state to be made public. We believe that in Macedonia there is almost no understanding, that the budget available to the Government and other state and public institutions are not their financial means, but as the former British Prime Minister Margaret Tacher stated, it is the taxpayers’ money, because governments do not have their own money. Therefore, we believe and we emphasize that the state and the public officials must be aware that they have to constantly inform and be accountable to the citizens for the amount of public money available, how the public money is spent and what are the results achieved by spending of the public money. Thus, we conducted a monitoring of the degree of transparency and publicity of the budget users’ public money and a research on how the budget users evaluate the effects and the results of their work. The information in a digitally developed 21st century provides easy and simple opportunities for the state and the public function holders to achieve transparency and accountability for the spending of public money. By monitoring the websites of 60 public institutions, we found out that an overwhelming small number of institutions use their websites to be accountable to the public. Through the second part of the research with similar findings, we found that in most of the institutions, the creation of the budget does not include a methodological evaluation of the budget proposals. This report is one of a series of activities we take to appeal to the Government, the state institutions and to the public that "their" budgets are subject to transparency, publicity, accountability and results from spending public money.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: fiscal transparency, budget users, accountability, Macedonia
• Subjects: H - Public Economics > H1 - Structure and Scope of Government > H11 - Structure, Scope, and Performance of Government; H - Public Economics > H6 - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt > H61 - Budget ; Budget Systems; H - Public Economics > H7 - State and Local Government ; Intergovernmental Relations > H72 - State and Local Budget and Expenditures

References

IBP, ‘More Public Information Needed to Hold Government to Account’, 2006, [online]. International Budget Project. Available at [http://www.internationalbudget.org/files/SummaryReport.pdf], accessed November 1st, 2014.

IBP, ‘Open Budget. Transform Lives. The Open Budget Survey 2008’ [online]. Available at [http://openbudgetindex.org/files/FinalFulLREPortEnglish1.pdf], accessed September 1st, 2014.

IBP, ‘Guide to the Open Budget Questionnaire: An Explanation of the Questions and the Response Options’, 2010, [online]. Available at [http://internationalbudget.org/files/GuideOBI2010_English.pdf], accessed September 1st, 2014.

Trenovski, Borce, and Marjan Nikolov. "COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF PERFORMANCE BASED BUDGETING IMPLEMENTATION." CEA Journal of Economics 10.2 (2016).

Trenovski, Borce, Ilina Mangova, and Nikola Levkov. "The level of fiscal transparency and accountability of budget users-evidence from Macedonia." International Journal of Public Policy 12.3-6 (2016): 210-242.

Nikolov, Marjan, Borce Trenovski, and Gabriela Dimovska. "Open and Transparent Budget Process in Western Balkan Countries." (2015).

Trenovski. B and Tashevska, B..(2014) “Performance Budgeting - for a Better Budget Process and Increasing Transparency and Accountability”, policy paper CEA/IDSC and European Union, (in Macedonian and Albanian)