Budget publication deadline nigh

Budget publication deadline nigh

• Source: Global Times
• [10:00 March 09 2011]
• Comments

By Li Shuang

Time is running out for all 58 municipal government offices and bureaus to publish their budget plans for 2011 before March 10. However, the documents are still too vague for the public to truly supervise government spending, experts say.

All 58 municipal government offices and bureaus are required to publish their budgets for the year within 15 days of their approval by the Bureau of Finance on February 25. Last year was the first time the municipal government required that budgets be published.

The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Finance was first to publish its plan on March 4, but so far only a handful of other government offices and bureaus, including the Municipal Bureau of Culture, the Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security and the Municipal Research Center for Rural Economy have published their budgets on their respective official websites using a set of standard forms.

While it is progress to have 13 more offices publishing their budgets than last year, when only 45 were held to that requirement, the standard forms have not improved in terms of comprehensiveness. The items laid out on two pages of simple forms are so general that they border on meaninglessness.

For example, the Bureau of Finance has published an anticipated income of 276,574,723.87 million yuan ($42.08 million) and expected expenditures of the exact same amount, a trend mirrored in the published budgets of other bureaus so far.

The income can be split into seven fields; the bureau selected "financial allocation" (249.67 million yuan), "State-owned enterprise profits" (14 million yuan), "undertaking revenue" (12.60 million) and "other income" (300,000 yuan).

Expenses can divide into two categories. The finance bureau allotted 264.72 million yuan for "general public service" and 11.86 million yuan for "employment and social security."

No definition as to what each category entails was given.

"It is still impossible for the People's Congress or any ordinary taxpayer to supervise government spending with such documents," said Wang Xixin, a professor of the Peking University Law School and an expert on the Budget Law of the People's Republic of China, which requires all government offices to report their budgets to the People's Congress annually.

Wang holds the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) as a model.