15/11/2007

Unused budget

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and Education Minister, the Movement for Quality Government claims that according to its examination, the approved budget for the Ministry of Education is systematically not being fully used, in a sum exceeding one billion NIS annually!

In her letter to the Prime Minister, Minister of Finance and Education Minister, Adv. Nili Even Hen, who is in charge of the research and finance department in the Movement, claims that according to an examination conducted by the MQG, some of the problems facing the Ministry of Education could be solved by implementing the Knesset’s decisions, and fully utilizing the budget allocated for the Ministry by the Knesset.
The examination revealed that over many years a sum of over one billion NIS annually has systematically been unused, a sum which could have been utilized for executing a large number of reforms and many other important plans.

The examination conducted by the Movement (according to National Budget execution reports of the Accountant General), reveals that for the past 12 years, maybe even longer, the Ministry of Education has only been partially utilizing its budget.
In addition, it was revealed that these findings on the unused budgets show that they have systematically existed for each and every year examined. There has not been one single year in which the budget utilized was equal or even close to the budget initially authorized by the State.
The data of the budget examined reveal a clear trend, at least from 1995 to date, which indicates a high annual balance of unused budget.
For example, during the past five years, each annual budget ended in an unused net surplus of over one billion NIS.

 

To further illustrate this point it should be mentioned that the total annual unused budget of the Ministry of Education exceeds the TOTAL budget of the Ministry of Agriculture.
To the best of MQG’s knowledge, the balance of unused budget money is returned to the State Treasury and is not credited to the Ministry of Education, and so, year after year, the Ministry loses huge sums of budget money initially allocated to it.
In this way, over the past 12 years, the Ministry has lost a budget of over 10 billion NIS, which could have been used to implement new structural reforms or execute other important projects.
Such a high balance of unused budget, which has repeated itself for so many years, should activate a red alert in the minds of all those in charge of the State Budget, since the end result is that the portion of the budget allocated for education is by far smaller than the one initially intended by the elected officials.
It should be noted that the serious matter of the unused budget which repeats itself year after year indicates that this problem is not a specific or unique one, but rather a systematic trend, by which the executive authority does not implement the Knesset’s decisions as far as budget allocation is concerned.
And so, time and time again, the Government continuously overrules the Knesset by creating a “legislative mountain” in the form of The Arrangements Law which the Knesset can neither comprehend nor monitor, and then the Government avoids executing the legislative body’s decision on a budget which has been legally approved.

In view of the above the MQG wishes to find the reason why the unused portion of the budget has been so high for so many years, and what the Ministry of Education intends to do in order to prevent this trend from continuing in the future.

 

For more details please contact: Mr. Shuky Levanon, Movement's spokesman,
Mobile: +972-52-2860181