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