To tighten the budget rule and discipline: Publicity, transparency and supervision increase of the community

Spending right in the budget estimates and cutting the unnecessary items are fundamental solutions. Photo: Thuy Linh.

Tighten both the collection and the expenditure

Many times sharing about the budget rule and discipline, Minister of Finance Dinh Tien Dung said that the budget revenue always reached and exceeded the estimates assigned by the National Assembly in the past years. However, for development requirements of the country, the expenditure demands would be great, especially expenditure for the infrastructure development, social security, hunger elimination and poverty reduction, the development of new rural programs, and the recovery of natural disasters… so that, it led to the State budget deficit. That forced us to tighten the budget rule and discipline. Tightening here, according to the head of Finance, it needs to ensure both budget collection and expenditure.

With regard to the budget collection, it is necessary to further strengthen the management of collection, combat losses, combat arrears and ensure a fair business environment for the enterprises. To carry out this task, the Government and Ministry of Finance have been implementing many solutions. This may include accelerating the reform of administrative procedures on taxation, contributing to the development of production and business, improving the investment environment; Focusing on solving the difficulties and obstacles for the enterprises, improving the business environment, creating conditions for the enterprises to develop stably and firmly, attracting the investment and increasing production capacity, promoting the economic growth and creating the stable and long-term revenue sources for the State budget. Along with that, speeding up the implementation of electronic tax payment, including submission via the electronic portal and the electronic channels provided by the commercial banks; implementing the electronic invoices…

The Finance Ministry should review regularly, and assign the target of increasing the revenues for the local system units conformity with the fact of localities, to ensure that the State budget revenues would increase at least 3% compared with the command estimates. The progress of revenue collection should be monitored closely, it should identify accurately the potential revenue, the sectors and taxes being lost to propose timely the effective management solutions; To propose the People's Committees to direct the branches and levels in localities to coordinate with the tax agencies in managing the collection and stepping up the measures against the budget deficit.

The most important thing in the State budget in order to avoid negative impacts, is the implementation of inspection, examination and recovery of tax debts. The units need to organize the review of tax debts, allocation of monthly and quarterly tax debt recovery norms; To classify the tax debts fully to work out management measures and to urge the tax collection appropriately, striving for the total tax debts of less than 5% of total state budget revenues by the end of 2018.

With regard to the budget expenditure, in the spirit of the Constitution of 2013, all expenditures must be estimated, therefore, all levels should operate resolutely the budget expenditures to the estimates of the National Assembly and People's Councils at all levels; Spending to absolutely not exceed the estimates except for the accrued expenses, necessary expenditure for emergencies to ensure peoples’ lives. At the same time, it must cut the unnecessary expenses; practice saving and combating the wastefulness in the budget expenditures. Particularly in recurrent expenditure, conferences, seminars, visits aboard, management and use of public assets…

Close to international standards

In addition to the positive measures mentioned above, the Ministry of Finance is carrying out strictly the publicity and transparency of Vietnam's budget in a way of broadening and increasingly being in line with international practices; the publicity and transparency of budget with the publicity of data, and the publicity of budget statements are required.

According to the State Budget Department of the Ministry of Finance, the content for the public had been completed and fulfilled, enabling people to monitor the whole budget process from the formulation of policies and regimes, submitting the budget estimates, implementation of budget balance, as well as auditing and the implementation of auditing recommendations. In the formulation and promulgation of policies on regimes of budget collection and expenditure, the draft on budget collection and expenditure policies would be published on websites of ministries and agencies for 45 days for comments of concerned organizations and individuals before they were promulgated; To create favorable conditions for people to contribute their opinions to the Government right from the stage of formulation and promulgation of budget policies. Thus, the policy-making agencies could receive comments from people and the enterprises to improve financial institutions and budget rules.

The State budget estimates must be publicized before being submitted to the National Assembly and People's Councils at all levels (proposed budget estimates), so that all organizations and individuals could participate in the process of state budget formulation. Apart from the publicity of estimates/final accounts already approved by competent authorities, all levels must also publicize the implementation situation of state budget in the year (quarterly, biannually and annually) to assist the latter in monitoring and controlling the whole budget process. The results of the budget audit as well as the settlement of audit proposals would be also public.

The form system would be unified from proposing the estimate, deciding the estimates, implementing the estimates in year and annual budget settlement to ensure uniformity, comparability and evaluation. The State budget collection and expenditure norms would be classified in line with the international practices and to ensure consistency between capital expenditures and recurrent expenditures. With publicizing the data for the whole reporting period, the estimates in the beginning of the year, the compare column between the implementation of estimates/balance and the estimates in the beginning of the year and compare with the same period last year… must be publicized to enhance the transparency in the information disclosure.

Forms of publicity are also defined clearly, in which the compulsory requirements to publicize on the electronic Site/Portal of the Ministry of Finance, Provincial People's Committee and Department of Finance to facilitate people access to the information.

In addition to strengthening the public disclosure of the State budget, the State Budget Law of 2015 stipulates additionally that the State budget is supervised by the community and assigned to the Vietnam Fatherland Front at all levels to assume the prime responsibility and coordinate with its members to monitor the State budget of the community; To create conditions for the organizations and individuals to make suggestions, examine and supervise the process of management and use of the State budget; To detect and stop promptly the acts of violating the financial management regime.