Treasury needs to be more transparent on budgets

Zimbabwe has been challenged to be more transparent with its citizens as it continues to miss the minimum fiscal transparency requirements.

The US Department of State released the Fiscal Transparency Report (for 2022) in which it said Zimbabwe that is among 27 countries surveyed, did improve in transparency but remained short on the minimum acceptable levels.

“During the review period, the Government made significant progress by ensuring actual revenues and expenditures reasonably corresponded to those in the enacted budget,” the report reads.

This comes after the Government made its executive budget proposal, enacted budget and end-of-year report available for public scrutiny in a timed deemed reasonable and online for a wider access.

“Information on some debt obligations was publicly available, including government guarantees of state-owned enterprise debt, but it did not publish total debt holdings by major state-owned enterprises,” the report notes.

This comes as the Government is saying state owned enterprises should be privatised or partially privatised as a way to run them in an efficient and transparent manner.

According to the report, the Government maintained significant off-budget accounts but, however, publicly available budget documents did not include a substantially complete picture of revenue and expenditures.

On another note the budget included aggregate allocations to, but not earnings from, state-owned enterprises.

Reservations were raised as the intelligence budget was not part of the public budget and there were no procedures in place to permit parliamentary review of it.

On the positive side, the report said the supreme audit institution met international standards of independence but did not publish substantive reports within a reasonable period.

“The government specified in law or regulation but did not appear to follow in practice the criteria and procedures for awarding natural resource extraction contracts or licenses. Basic information on mining concessions was not publicly available,” the report discloses.

According to the report, Zimbabwe’s fiscal transparency would be improved by, publishing debt information of major state-owned enterprises as well as subjecting off-budget accounts and the intelligence budget to civilian oversight.

Treasury will also need to provide a complete picture of revenues and expenditures and detailing allocations to and revenues from state-owned enterprises in budget documents in order to meet the minimum acceptable level of transparency.

The report also said it would be aided if they follow laws and regulations governing natural resource extraction contracting and licensing in practice and making basic information about such awards publicly available.-ebusinessweekly