EB-2

When is the EB made available to the public?
 * a. Two weeks or less after the budget has been enacted
 * b. Between two weeks and six weeks after the budget has been enacted
 * c. More than six weeks, but less than three months, after the budget has been enacted
 * d. The EB is not released to the public, or is released more than three months after the budget has been enacted

Guidelines
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.

2) The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina in OBS 2019
According to Article 10 of Bosnia’s “Law on Financing of the Institutions of BiH,” the Presidency must submit the EBP for the upcoming fiscal year (which is a calendar fiscal year) to the Parliamentary Assembly by 1 November of the current year. Furthermore, the Parliamentary Assembly is then obligated to adopt the EBP no later than 31 December of the current year.

Due to protracted political gridlock, these deadlines to submit the FY2019 EBP were missed, and Bosnia’s Council of Ministers promulgated a “Decision on Temporary Financing of BiH Institutions and International Obligations for the period January – March 2019.” This was done using authority granted in Article 11 of the Law on Financing, which allows interim funding for up to one quarter of the new FY budget based on the most recently enacted EB.

Faced with the lack of a published EBP for FY2019 as of 31 December 2018, the researcher deemed the EBP not publicly available. However, because no EB for FY2019 had yet been approved, and because continuing resolutions such as the “Decision on Temporary Financing…” are not considered EBs either, we instructed the researcher to consider the EBP (and EB) for FY2018.

Note: In discussing this example, we made comparisons to the case from Sri Lanka (see Question EB-2).