In-Year Reports

In-Year Reports are issued during the year as the budget is being executed. They are intended to show the executive’s progress in implementing the budget. They typically show actual expenditure by administrative unit (ministries, departments, or agencies), to ensure that they are held accountable for their expenditure. In some countries, the administrative units issue the reports individually, while in other countries the information is consolidated into one report, which is typically issued by the Treasury.

Assessing the public availability of the IYR
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 IYRs to be considered publicly available, IYRs must be made available to the public no later than three months after the reporting period ends. If at least seven of the last 12 monthly IYRs, or at least three of the last four quarterly IYRs are not released to the public at least three months after the reporting period ends, 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 IYRs. See Question IYRs-2 for more information.

Questions on the PBS in the OBS

 * Questions on the IYRs in the OBS

1) Should we accept information in budget portals as supplementary information for IYRs if we can verify how often the portal is updated with new data?
In general, we accept websites that show execution information as support of the IYRs, if they update the information regularly. For example, though a date in the website itself.

2) 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.