Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Government fails to meet revenue mobilisaion, spending targets

The government has failed to expedite the budget expenditure, and also failed to meet the revenue mobilisation target even in the five months.
Though the government has claimed to enhance the budget implementation capacity, it has been able to spend only 9.05 per cent of capital expenditure in the first five months of the current fiscal year, according to the Financial Comptroller General Office (FCGO).
According to the Financial Comptroller General Office, the government has managed to spend only Rs 37.49 billion or 9.05 per cent of the total Rs 408 billion budget allocated for capital expenditure for the current fiscal year 2019-20. Similarly, the government has till today spent Rs 246.92 billion – or 25.8 per cent – of the total Rs 957.10 billion recurrent budget. Recurrent expenditure is primarily the spending of the government on salaries of government staffers, social security and other expenses.
“Of the total budget of Rs 167.86 billion under Financing budget, the government has been able to spend Rs 14.17 billion or 8.44 per cent,” according to the FCGO. “The government’s total budget spending – including capital expenditure, financing and recurrent – during the five months of the current fiscal year stood at Rs 298.6 billion or 19.48 per cent of the total budget of Rs 1.53 trillion for the current fiscal year.”
The government – in the budget for the fiscal year 2019-20 – had announced that it would observe the current fiscal year as the year to implement budget. But the lethargic development expenditure hints at a slow pace of development activities also due to inefficient bureaucracy and age-old state machinery, despite the most powerful government in the history of Nepal. However, the Finance Ministry, as always, claimed to address the perennial problem of low capital spending through different measures. But the government measures – to accelerate the spending – have also failed to push for the capital expenditure.
The problem lies in project planning and execution, according to the experts, who blames the low budget spending to result of lack of proper project planning, weak policy execution capacity of the bureaucracy and weak project execution capacity of contractors. "The problem has become more serious as the bureaucracy has been highly politicised, and lacks meritocracy."
The Finance Ministry, however, claimed that budget implementation is dependent on cooperation and coordination among different ministries – especially the Physical Planning Ministry – and they have not been able to coordinate. The Finance Ministry also blames sluggish capital expenditure to the Public Procurement Act, which is under process to be reviewed to expedite the expenditure.

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