Year-End Report

This is a key accountability document produced by the executive after the end of the fiscal year that reports extensively on the government’s financial activities and its performance on implementing the budget during the entire fiscal year. In many countries, the executive issues one Year-End Report that consolidates information on revenue collections, debt, and expenditures for administrative units. In other countries, individual administrative units issue their own Year-End Reports. Similarly, Year-End Reports may be stand-alone documents or may be included in larger documents, such as the Executive’s Budget Proposal. The form of the report is less important than its content. The reports ought to cover all of the major items included in the budget, explaining differences between the original estimates (as amended by the legislature during the year) and the actual outcomes for expenditure, revenue, debt, and the macroeconomic assumptions. These reports should also review nonfinancial performance information and other important policy areas. They can also include a financial statement.

Assessing the public availability of the YER
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 YER to be considered publicly available, it must be made available to the public no later than one year after the fiscal year to which it corresponds. If the YER is not released to the public within one year after the end of the fiscal year to which it corresponds, 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 YER. See Question YER-2 for more information.

Questions on the YER in the OBS

 * Questions on the YER in the OBS

1) The case of Jamaica in OBS 2019
In OBS 2019 in Jamaica, we thought the “Fiscal Policy Paper 2018-19", which was produced, published and sent to parliament along with the EBP, could also be a good candidate for the YER (see part 3, page 35). The researcher had contacted the Ministry of Finance and when she asked about the YER, she was directed to the Fiscal Policy Paper. However, the FY2017-18 information in this document only covers 9 months of the fiscal year, through December (Jamaica’s fiscal year runs from April to March). Because of this, we decided to assess Jamaica’s YER as “not produced” for OBS 2019. Even though we can, for example, accept Mid-Year Reviews that only cover 4 months, for a Year-End Report to only cover 9 months is not sufficient.

2) The case of Thailand in OBS 2019
Thailand produces separate YER documents for revenues and expenditures, published at different points in the year and by different departments. The two documents were both published on-time in 2018: the Fiscal Risks Report was published in April 2017 with revenues and the Blue Book was published in June 2018 with expenditures showing comparisons between year-end out comes and actual results on the approved budget heads, published as a separate document along with the EBP supporting documents. While not all BY-1 information in EBPs can be used as a YER, in this case, as the Blue Book is published as a separate report within the EBP supporting documents, and because the purpose of the entire document is to present year-end outcomes of expenditures in the previous year, the combination of these two documents is accepted as the YER in Thailand in OBS 2019.

3) What if COVID prevented the publication of the a key budget document?
Even if the COVID crisis prevented the publication of a key budget document, we are not considering it to be an exceptional circumstance because of which we could look back to assess the document from a previous fiscal year. Many governments worked hard to ensure publication of budget documents, even during the pandemic, though these documents were at times less comprehensive and timely than usual. We would not want to give credit to a country that did not publish a document during the pandemic while penalizing a country that did publish a document, just one that is less comprehensive. In addition, it is difficult to pinpoint when COVID prevented a document's publication. Finally, COVID impacted all countries in the survey, unlike the usual exceptions allowed in the survey (a one-time election in a country, for example).

Note: One country that is still under discussion is Canada. The Government of Canada was set to present their budget for 2020/21 budget in late March 2020, before it was postponed in mid-March because of the pandemic. It was pushed back a few times, before finally being postponed indefinitely in early May. This continued for the rest of 2020. Between 12 March 2020 and 30 December 2020 the Parliament passed 12 spending or tax bills. A number of these (if not a majority) are the legislation that we are considering Canada’s emergency fiscal policy package in the COVID Module. While there was no budget proposal for 2020/21, the Government did publish a Fall Economic Statement 2020 in November – this is the document that we will consider as the MYR for 2020/21 and the PBS for 2021/22. Canada also presented an “Economic and Fiscal Snapshot 2020” in July, which was a new document that focused on the Government’s fiscal response to COVID (and we use heavily in the COVID Module).

Because Canada's lack of publication of these budget documents was not a transparency issue but rather a calculated response to the pandemic - particularly in the case of the budget proposal - it is still under team discussion.