New Democrat (Monrovia)
23 October 2009
The 2009/10 fiscal budget's execution process is marred with confusion, with Finance Ministry officials issuing more allotments and expending less than generated revenue.
Allotments totalling a little over US$67m were issued via the Budget Department to ministries and agencies to meet their spending requests and needs in the first quarter, but the Expenditure Department committed only US$51m for cash payments, Deputy Minister for Revenue Elfreda Tamba said Tuesday in an exclusive interview with this paper.
This implies that for three months now, some ministries and agencies are still holding on allotments valued over US$16 million that were not committed for payments, thus stalling projects and programs that should have been implemented in the said quarter.
The Revenue Minister said that her department generated US$52m, as revenue as projected for the first quarter and that US$5m was "committed" for payments against those allotments.
Thus, subtracting the US$51m from the generated US$52m, there will be resulting US$1million unspent revenue in the first quarter amidst huge spending requests (US$16 million unprocessed revenue) from various government institutions.
Quizzed why allotments exceeded generated revenue when the budget is cash-based, the minister said: "They might have made the allotments due to lack of information, " adding, "You may find a difference between the allotments and the revenue raised. On the side of the Budget Department, they allotted more than the revenue raised "
This situation is occurring when fiscal authorities have reported uncertainty in revenue re-flow, something that is being attributed to China Union's reported failure to provide its USD40m signature fee.
USD20 million of this amount, according to revenue officials, was projected to have come in the first quarter.
Thus had China Union made available the USD20m in the first quarter, and that amount added to the generated USD52m, there would be a total of USD72m collected revenue in the first quarter.
Though the minister dismissed this paper's revelation and analysis on a USD20m shortfall in the first quarter based on straight projection calculation following the Budget Minister's admission that less than US$70m was generated, with China Union's defaulted US$20m permanently featuring in this situation, it is understood that the budget is implicitly experiencing a shortfall.
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