By Taban Henry
The Reconstituted Transitional National Legislative Assembly (R-TNLA) has named government agencies that had spent beyond their budget lines in the 2021/2022 fiscal year budget describing them as indiscipline.
The exposure of the indiscipline government spending agencies came during the presentation of the report of the standing specialized committee on finance and Economic planning on the fiscal year 2022-2023 budget passed in its third and final reading on Thursday.
Speaking to the media after the passing the fiscal budget, the Chairperson for the Standing Specialized Committee for Finance and Economic Planning at the R-TNLA Changkuoth Bichiock Reth named the agencies that spent beyond their allocated budget for the year 2021-2022.
“The Fiscal Year 2021-2022 budget performance indicates wide indiscipline in the budget execution. Six sectors overspent their budget among them includes, Economic, infrastructure, Public Administration, Rule of Law, security and Humanitarian,” he disclosed.
Bichiock added that three of the ten sectors budgeted were cheated as they underspent and they are; accountability, health, education and natural resource sectors.
“Economic 26%, Public Administration 21%, Infrastructure sector 19% and all this had major shares of expenditure in the Fiscal Year 2021-2022 national budget. Rule of law, Security, Humanitarian, Natural Resource owns up to 16%, 15%, 2% and 1% of the budget outturn respectively. Education sector accounts for 7% of the expenditure budget in the fiscal year 2021-2022,” he explained.
The parliamentary finance committee’s chairperson however stated that this year’s budget has just been passed and the allocation is good as per the constitution saying their numbers of allocations.
He noted that the education has been at least allocated 10% that is to be apportioned to schools especially the Ministry of General Education and Instructions has been captured already as well as the health sector.
“The states have also been allocated for properly and I believe they will really make use of what they have,” he said.
Bichiock underscored that the parliament is concerned on the living standard of the citizens not only now but for the last few years and even few months where the prices have shot up.
“We are now engaging the responsible ministries like the Ministry of Trade and Industry because they are the ones to regulate the prices in the markets such that we have the real prices and why the prices of goods are really up,” he lamented.