Auditor General Janar Holm’s annual speech in front of the full assembly of the Riigikogu on November 6
I am not talking today about whether the state budget should be activity-based, classic expenditure-based or something else. It’s mainly a distraction. Based on the current state budget, it would even be unfair to evaluate the functioning or non-functioning of the activity-based budget, because our budget, which is called an activity-based budget, is not actually that in content. The experience of the countries shows that different elements are used simultaneously in the budgets. If you penetrate into the content of the annual budget of some countries, which is considered classic, it is possible to find even more activity-based elements than in Estonia’s so-called activity-based budget. The question is the appropriateness, expediency, implementation capability and skills of the approach.
My surprise and fright was great when I heard this spring from my colleague, the State Auditor of Latvia, that the Estonian civil servants have introduced the so-called success story of our activity-based state budget to the Latvian Ministry of Finance and, apparently, to the Latvian government as well. The Ministry of Finance of Latvia is said to have started quite seriously and quite actively to talk about carrying out a reform in Latvia based on the alleged success story of Estonia.
We have certainly had smaller conflicts with the Latvians in history, including the so-called herring war nearly 30 years ago, but in my opinion, the Latvians have still been excellent neighbors to us and they have in no way deserved to be a part of this so-called “success story” of our activity-based budget.
In comparison, it is embarrassing in front of our Latvian colleague, knowing the problems we actually have with budgeting and the budget. Estonian officials can coldly tell their neighbors that we have linked the use of state money to the results or that we have been able to increase the efficiency of the use of state money thanks to activity-based budget information. The National Audit Office’s analysis – and not only ours – shows that, unfortunately, this has not happened.
In the case of the state budget, the most important thing is not what we call the way it is presented, but that it is possible to understand the budget carefully and clearly: where
Source: online.le.ee
