“The public should know how the document, on the scope of which depend lives of thousands of people, is prepared“, said Rodoljub Sabic, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance. The barest minimum of requirements is that the public knows the objectives and the criteria of budget revision. Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic used these words to comment for the “Politika” daily the manner in which national budget was revised. As he said, that process must be much more transparent.
“Thus, if the objective is to reduce the budget deficit, which is completely legitimate, we should know in advance how achievement of that objective is planned. Whether by linear reduction or by some other criteria. And we should know who, why and how much should reduce spending. And that is completely unknown to us and the impression is that the revision is based on the “idea” that those who have already been saving should save even more, and those who have not been saving do not have to save“, Mr. Sabic is being critical.
Mr. Nemanja Nenadic, Program Director of Transparency Serbia, also thinks it is worrying that Serbia does not have expert debate on the budget and its revision. More precisely, Serbia does not have instutionalized possibilities for an expert interested in those issues to submit his/her opinion to makers of the budget.
“Budget beneficiaries who should normally participate in those activities could not propose the ways to reduce costs in budget revision. We have heard from the Commissioner that the document was forwarded to him to give his opinion about it without prior consultations. In Serbia, the budget is usually adopted in the last moment and deputies also often do not have enough time to read the whole document“, Mr. Nenadic said.
Commissioner Rodoljub Sabic said on one occasion that the Ministry of Finance planned “saving” without consultations, according to unknown subjective criteria. Thus, instead on positions where more funds could actually be saved, cuts were made in areas where funds are necessary for basic functions. On the other hand, more money could have really been saved from salaries of employees, because, as he said, the Commissioner worked with significantly lower number of associates than required.
“At first sight, it is completely logical to take funds if they are not spent. However, we obviously need to know why funds are not being spent. In case of the Commissioner, the Assembly adopted the budget and approved employment of new workers. However, it was not possible because the Government did not provide us necessary premises. Even worse, it provided us and the Ombudsman together a large, once magnificent building in Karadjordjeva 48 Street, but it did not provide us the funds necessary for its adaptation, without which it is completely useless. We could not spend planned funds without workers, at least not appropriately. And the situation remains the same year after year“, the Commissioner explained.
He added that we should think about the message Serbia as a country sent to the neighbouring countries because it trumpeted about the fight against corruption and at the same time revised the budget by cutting the funds intended for the State Audit Institution by one third, while the average reduction for budget beneficiaries amounted to five percent.
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Journalists filed 400 Complaints
The Commissioner’s statistics show that journalists filed 400 complaints against the Ministry of Finance. “These data also indicate problems in the relation between the Ministry of Finance and the public“, the Commissioner said.
“At times the scale of those problems was alarming, so I drew the attention of the Government and the public to them, for example in the case of the Restitution Network. A number of complaints were filed by responsible persons of the Association of Journalists and of numerous daily papers, such as “Politika”, “Blic”, “Danas”, “Kurir”, “Alo”… More or less, responsible persons of all media. Slight comfort is the fact that after Commissioner’s intervention requesters usually received previously denied information, in about 95 percent of cases. The number of complaints must be reduced and the Ministry should considerably improve its attitude towards the right of the public to know”, Mr. Sabic said.
