Proposed amendments to the State Budget Law

Ministry of Finance proposes amendments to the State Budget Law

The Ministry of Finance said that, based on the summary of 13 years of implementation, to overcome the shortcomings and inadequacies of the 2002 State Budget Law, the 2015 State Budget Law was passed by the 13th National Assembly, 9th session on June 25, 2015, effective from the 2017 budget year (referred to as the State Budget Law). After the State Budget Law was passed by the National Assembly, competent authorities issued a full set of Resolutions, Decrees, and Circulars to ensure a full legal basis and organized training and widespread propaganda to implement the Law from the 2017 budget year.

After more than 8 years of implementation (2017-2025), the State Budget Law has come into effect, unifiedly managing the national finance, enhancing the initiative and responsibility of agencies and organizations in managing and using the State budget, consolidating financial discipline, economically and effectively using the State budget and assets, increasing accumulation to carry out industrialization and modernization of the country in the direction of socialism, meeting the requirements of socio-economic development, improving people's lives, ensuring national defense, security and foreign affairs.

However, in the process of implementation, the objective impacts that change the revenue structure, the central budget (NSTW) still plays a leading role but tends to decrease, while the requirement requires further strengthening the initiative of the local budget (NSĐP); the work of building, synthesizing the state budget estimates and allocating the central budget, implementing and finalizing the state budget has also arisen a number of limitations and inadequacies that need to be studied to review and amend to suit the reality.

Therefore, the development of a draft Law on State Budget amending the 2015 Law on State Budget is extremely necessary, in order to concretize the Party's orientations in the 13th Party Congress Documents, the resolutions and conclusions issued by the Central Executive Committee and the Politburo, and the resolutions of the National Assembly.

The objective of the revised State Budget Law project is to innovate the revenue decentralization mechanism between the central government and local governments to ensure fairness, publicity, transparency, and promote the leading role of the central government and the proactiveness of local governments.

At the same time, innovate the budget allocation mechanism for agencies and units, ensuring publicity and transparency; implement decentralization and delegation of authority in promulgating mechanisms and policies on state budget collection and expenditure; eliminate the request-grant mechanism, which can easily lead to negativity and administrative procedures in the management and allocation of the state budget.

Amendment of regulations on the principle of balancing the state budget

Regarding the principle of balancing the State budget, the draft proposes to amend and supplement the regulations on the outstanding loan balance of local governments. The current law stipulates that localities are divided into 3 groups, each group is based on the budget capacity of each locality and the ratio of local budget revenue enjoyed according to decentralization compared to regular expenditure. The draft proposes to amend and supplement the reduction from 3 local groups to 2 local groups and increase the outstanding loan balance: the group of localities that do not receive additional balancing from the central government, the outstanding loan balance does not exceed 120% of the local budget revenue enjoyed according to decentralization; the group of localities that receive additional balancing from the central government, the outstanding loan balance does not exceed 80% of the local budget revenue enjoyed according to decentralization.

The reason and basis for the proposed amendments and supplements given by the Ministry of Finance is to ensure the outstanding debt level of localities as decided by the National Assembly in the Law on the Capital and the Resolution on specific mechanisms and policies; on the other hand, determining the outstanding debt level of localities according to the ratio of local budget revenue enjoyed according to decentralization compared to regular expenditure will change every year, and there will even be differences when determining according to the budget estimate at the beginning of the year and the implementation at the end of the year, leading to difficulties in the implementation process.

More specific regulations on publicizing the State budget

Regarding the public disclosure of the State budget (Article 15), the draft proposes amendments and supplements in the direction of: More specific regulations on the subjects of public disclosure and the content of disclosure.

Accordingly, it clearly stipulates the subjects of disclosure including: State budget levels; budget estimate units, organizations supported by the State budget, and adds the subjects of disclosure as extra-budgetary state financial funds.

Clearly specify the content of disclosure for each subject of disclosure. At the same time, supplement the provisions on the content of disclosure of the conclusions of the Inspection agency and the results of the implementation of the conclusions of the State budget inspection by the Inspection agency (except for the contents that are not subject to disclosure according to the provisions of law).

The Ministry of Finance said that this proposed amendment and supplement aims to approach international standards on budget transparency; help people access, fully and promptly grasp information about the State budget and participate in contributing opinions and supervising the allocation, management and use of the State budget.

In addition, taking into account the opinions of a number of ministries, central and local agencies; at the same time creating conditions for organizations and individuals to monitor and access information conveniently and effectively, the draft proposes to add mandatory requirements for agencies and units with electronic information portals to make public information on the agency's and unit's electronic information portal.

Please read the full draft and give your comments here.

Source: https://thoibaonganhang.vn/de-xuat-sua-doi-luat-ngan-sach-nha-nuoc-162123.html