Spending large amount of state budget for cities/provinces for environmental protection

Source: Internet

In the proposal submitted to the Office of the National Assembly, the elector of Nghe An province proposed that the Ministry of Finance should have measures to balance the budget excluding the environmental protection fee collected from mineral exploitation in the balance of regular expenditures of local budgets, in order to facilitate the provincial budget for supporting localities which have mining activities are funded with environmental pollution treatment.

Regarding to this issue, the Ministry of Finance said that under the provisions of Clause 1, Article 7 of the State Budget Law of 2015, revenues collected from taxes, charges, fees and other revenues as prescribed by Law shall be collected fully to balance the state budget, in accordance with the principle disassociated with specific expenditure tasks. In the case that has revenues are required to be associated with specific expenditure tasks as provided for by law, it shall be allocated correspondingly from those revenues in the estimates budget expenditure for implementation.

The Environmental Protection Law 2014 also regulates state budget expenditures on environmental protection, including expenditures on environmental non-business activities and expenditures on investment for environmental protection development.

To implement the above laws, the revenues from taxes, charges, and fees related to exploiting natural resources and minerals shall be collected fully into the balance of the state budget in order to ensure the State budget expenditure tasks as prescribed. In that, it has the task of spending for environmental protection, disassociated with specific expenditure tasks.

Besides that, the Prime Minister issued Decision No. 46/2016/QD-TTg on the promulgation of the norms for allocation of annual state budget expenditure in 2017 (the period of stable budget in 2017-2020), in that allocating expenditure for environmental non-business activities which equivalent to 1% of total state budget expenditure, while prioritize 85% of this budget to allocate to local budgets for implementation.

In particular, the expenditure appropriation for development investment from the state budget will also be allocated to carry out construction projects and renovate waste treatment facilities, to build and equip the environmental monitoring and analysis station which are managed by the Government; To invest in vehicles and equipment for prevention, response and surmount environmental pollution, degradation and environmental accidents; responding to climate change; conservation of biodiversity; Renovation of polluted water sources, planting and tending of trees in public places and public utilities in accordance with the Law on Environmental Protection and the State Budget Law.

In fact, in a recent report of the Ministry of Finance on environmental protection tax, in the period 2012-2016, the total collected environmental protection tax in period 2012-2016 is about 105.985 billion vnd, average of 21.197 billion vnd/ year and accounting for 1.48% - 4.27% of total state budget revenue and 0.34% - 0.98% of annual GDP.

The total state budget for environmental protection tasks in the period 2012-2016 was about 131,857 billion vnd, which was higher than the tax collected in this period with was about 52,420 billion vnd of regular expenditures from the central budget and local budgets allocated directly for environmental protection non-business. In that, most expenditure was spent for local budgets.