Enacted Budget

The Enacted Budget is a document (a budget or appropriation) that is typically approved by the legislature, after debating the executive’s proposed budget. The Enacted Budget provides the baseline information for any analyses conducted during the fiscal year. In other words, it is the starting point for monitoring the execution phase of the budget. In some countries, the Executive’s Budget Proposal varies significantly from the Enacted Budget, so it is important that the content of the two documents is assessed individually. The Enacted Budget grows in importance when it differs significantly from the budget proposal. The Enacted Budget allows one to compare what was proposed by the executive to what the legislature enacted into law.

Assessing the public availability of the EB
Publicly available budget documents are defined as those documents that are published on the website of the public authority issuing the document within the time frame specified in the OBS methodology and that all citizens are able to obtain free of charge. (See the Open Budget Survey Guidelines on Public Availability of Budget Documents.) This is a change from previous rounds of the Open Budget Survey: now at minimum documents must be made available on the Internet and free of charge to be considered publicly available.

The OBS methodology requires that for an EB to be considered publicly available, it must be made available to the public three months after the budget is approved by the legislature. If the EB is not released to the public at least three months after the budget is approved by the legislature, option “d” applies. Option “d” should also be chosen for documents that are produced for internal purposes only (that is, produced but never released to the public) or are not produced at all. Some governments may publish budget documents further in advance than the latest possible dates outlined above. In these instances, researchers should choose options “a” or “b,” depending on the date of publication identified for the EB. See Question EB-2 for more information.

Questions on the EB in the OBS

 * Questions on the EB in the OBS

1) Can we accept information in the citizen version of the EB, which is not in the main document?
For OBS 2019 in the Philippines – the citizens version of the EB is published later than the EB (Expenditure Bill). The main approved bill only has expenditures, but other revenue laws are passed soon after, none of which have total revenue estimates. However, the citizens budget of the EB, which is published within three months of enactment, has approved revenue estimate. In OBS 2019, we will accept the information in the citizen’s versions of the EB for the revenue questions in the EB questions in Section 3.

2) When can we reference EBP annexes in EB questions?
In Nicaragua in OBS 2019, the budget law was approved and published on time but the related annexes were published late. The budget law notes that the “proposal is approved with some small changes included in the Annex of the EB.” Is the reference to the EBP sufficient to consider the EBP documents as part of the EB (given that the amendments are minor and documented in the EB), or do we only reference EBP documents as part of the EB when the EB is approved without change (and our other criteria are met)?

From the point of view of CSOs, the changes referenced are small (only about two pages). Also, all the changes are documented in the EB so we have all that information (we just don’t have the updated annexes because they were published late). The real question is, can we score the related EB questions in Section 3 (such as questions on whether budget information is presented by administrative classification) based on the original EBP annexes?

We voted 6-5 to not accept referencing the original EBP annexes for EB questions. We will consider the EB annexes to be published and neither include these nor the original EBP annexes in our assessment of the EB questions.”

3) When should we use a prior year’s EB in case of delay in the budget’s approval?
In Timor-Leste for OBS 2019, the 2018 enacted budget being assessed by the survey was only approved on September 27, 2018, after having already extended the 2017 budget for most of the year on a month-by-month basis through a constitutional provision (“duo-decimal system”). The delay was caused due to a contentious election and a delay in forming a government – and the delay resulted in the citizen’s budget of the EB for 2018 being published late, even though the EB was published on time. There was a question of whether the 2018 approved budget should be treated as the EB, however, as it was approved so late. The team decided that because the document approved figures for the full-year, and not just the final three-months, it is considered the EB. Furthermore, even though the election delay was an extraordinary circumstance, it still impacted budget transparency, and therefore both the EB for 2018 and the CB of the EB for 2018 were the correct fiscal years to be assessed in OBS 2019.