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.