Auditor General sheds light on PBO struggle

Those following the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s ongoing struggle to obtain detailed budgetary information from federal departments might want to look at Tuesday’s auditor general’s report.

At the heart of the PBO’s current tussle with federal departments regarding the release of budgetary details is a question of how up-to-speed parliamentarians are on what the government is spending or cutting. The Main Estimates that parliamentary committees have approved oversaw this spring weren’t related to the changes laid out in the 2012 spring budget, and neither were the reports on plans and priorities the government put out in May. So, essentially, MPs are currently in the dark on the specific details of how the government’s planned cuts are going to be executed by each department and what that means.

Bearing that in mind, this passage from Tuesday’s fall auditor general’s report – from the overview of chapter 7 on long-term fiscal sustainability – is interesting:

    “Regularly since 2010 and on occasion before that, Finance Canada has been providing the Minister of Finance with the results of fiscal sustainability analyses that project budgetary balance and public debt in the long term. However, the Department does not prepare these analyses — which indicate how budget measures will impact the fiscal position of the federal, provincial, and territorial governments — in time to inform budget decisions and before budgets are tabled in Parliament. For a given budget, the Minister is not informed of the overall long-term fiscal impact until months after the budget measures have been approved.

    While Finance Canada prepared a draft report in 2007 on the longterm fiscal sustainability analyses that the government committed to issuing that year, the analyses were not published; nor has any report on long-term fiscal sustainability been published since then. While long-term fiscal sustainability analyses have been regularly prepared since 2010, they have not been made public. This lack of reporting means that parliamentarians and Canadians do not have all the relevant information to understand the long-term impact of budgets on the federal, provincial, and territorial governments in order to support public debate and to hold the government to account. Many of the countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) already publish reports on their long-term fiscal positions.”

Within the report, the AG says that Finance Canada “told the audit team that the long-term projections that included the impact of the measures announced in the 2012 Budget were given to the Minister of Finance in August 2012. This means that senior management and the Minister of Finance were not informed of the overall impact of the 2012 Budget on the government’s long-term fiscal position until well after they had approved the budget measures.” (Emphasis mine)

As the AG’s report notes, Finance Canada responded and “agrees with all of the recommendations.”

“Starting with Budget 2012,” the report states, “the Department of Finance Canada will expand its internal analysis to provide the Minister of Finance with an assessment of the overall long-term fiscal implications of new budget measures before the budget is finalized.”

Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Colin Horgan