Performance-Based Budgeting in the Maldives
In the Past, Budgeting for the Public Sector was considered just to play the financial figures without proper planning for future scheduled activities, from the Finance Sections or Budgetary Sections of Public Offices. While passing these budgets from parliament, it was just politically motivated wordings rather than directly focused on the needs of the general public. The Maldives is a developing nation, and taxation is very near to be imposed. Taxpayers should be aware that they are paying tax to run an administration that should be more accountable and more focused on economic and social development.
When we heard the President’s Radio address on 17th September 2010, mentioning the forecasted budget 2011 as program budget, Public Organizations should be focusing on their programs rather than figures. He said that the purpose of a program budget is to determine the targets every government office wanted to achieve in upcoming years and identify the means to achieve those targets. The first thing that came to my mind was, “what the hell we were doing during past years, in the name of budgeting?” what was MPs checking while they passed past budgets?
When I recalled how it used to be in the past, I realized that the program budget was not a new thing for us, and the government introduced it during 2005. Those days it was just a list of activities, charged to budget line items like Economical Development, Social Development, etc.… Again many questions came to my mind:
1) What will happen to the expenditure that occurred in the name of programs after 11 November 2008?
2) Why those program budgeting functions failed?
Answers were clear;
1) Present Administration came to power with set promises to the general public, and all expenditures after 11 November 2008 should be focused on those promises, and Ministry of Finance and Treasury should check the past expenditure details, where they have to find out the bleeding areas (expenditures occurred outside those promises). Aline historical figures related to present activities and keep the records ready for the questions on the budget debate.
2) In the past, it was failed since nobody was checking the programmed activity after passing the budget. Government Ministries were misusing the activity budgets by using them for other administrative and luxury activities. Auditor General’s Office, who is legally responsible for performance audits of public offices, never checked the activities during the audits naming them as performance audits (published audit reports 2008-2010). It will repeatedly fail if we do not keep periodic monitoring of budgets from the Ministry of Finance and Treasury and annual performance audits (based on budgeted programs) from AGO.
Preparing a budget is just like dreaming of achieving something; the most immense responsibility is to implement the budget with accountability. We can give many names to budgets like Zero Based budget, Activity Budget, Performance-based budget, etc... but to use it faithfully and monitor it consistently is a challenge.
