"Pocketable report" – make budget date simple, easy to understand

The "pocketable report" is implemented by the Ministry of Finance from the fiscal year 2015. Photo: H.V.

Encourage people to "contribute comment"

As recommended by budget transparency organizations, governments should develop a separate budget report for citizens to help make public budgets friendly and understandable. In practice, the focus on publicity and transparency of the state budget in various forms has been paid attention by the Ministry of Finance for many years. However, only a part of the population are interested in state budget work, because State budget reports contain in-depth information, requiring readers to be knowledgeable about finance - state budget. In addition, people are not aware the state budget is the tax contributed by themselves and they need to monitor the management and use of this money. Thus, the state budget disclosure has not really come to life.

Therefore, although the State Budget Law does not regulate the disclosure of budget statements for citizens, from the fiscal year 2015, the Ministry of Finance has actively developed and issued a separate budget report for citizens under form of a pocket-sized paperwork, to simplify budgeting disclosure to be more user-friendly and accessible to the public.

According to Mr. Vo Thanh Hung, Director of the State Budget Department, in the process of developing the report, the Ministry of Finance has consulted international best practices, has organized workshops to consult scientists, representatives of groups of people... to provide people with the most basic, simple and easy to understand information. Thanks to that, although only within a few pages, the report still provides basic information such as: targets of the annual state budget; basic economic norms to serve as a basis for estimating state budget; State budget revenues and expenditures; the structure of public debts and foreign debts of the country; solutions to fulfill state budget tasks.

Through such information, the management agencies aim to propagate and educate all people to gradually learn about the state budget. Thus, they are able to give their comments to the budget issue to the National Assembly, the People's Councils at all levels through the members of National Assembly and People's Council; contributing to reduce negative effects, corruption and waste in management and use of state budget.

Specifically, each time the report is prepared, the Ministry of Finance recognizes comments, finds modern, updated and understandable methods to improve quality.

"Open" from making estimates

The budget report for citizens is designed in a pocketable, short, eye-catching way, mostly in terms of tables, charts, which is easy to understand and easy to compare. However, due to the brevity of this case, there are many concerns that the report could be too sketchy to help people and experts understand what is really going on with the budget and "where will the budget go in the future?"

The question is not wrong if we look at the report alone. However, as Mr. Vo Thanh Hung mentioned, this report aims to help the people, even those who hold limited knowledge of finance - budget can access and capture basic information on state budget, so with the short, easy to understand version, accessibility is top priority for the drafting agency.

In addition, in order to meet the requirements on studying state budget of different target groups, the Ministry of Finance not only publicize the state budget through state budget reports for citizens. Over time, under the implementation of the provisions of the State Budget Law and the Law on Realities, the Law on Anti-Corruption, the Ministry of Finance has focused on strengthening the publicity and transparency in state budget management, from the publicity of budgetary regimes and policies, developing a clear, transparent budget process to the disclosure of data and documents related to budget estimates and finalization.

In particular, from the fiscal year 2017, apart from publicizing the budget estimates and finalization of the state budget, which has been approved by the National Assembly, the Ministry of Finance has made public budget estimates when submitting to the National Assembly, publicizing the implementation of State budget estimation in the year. The disclosure of state budget data is also accompanied by explanatory reports, explanations to contribute to improving transparency, facilitating people to capture, monitor, comment and monitor the process of making, allocating, managing and using state budget.

The state budget disclosure reports are published by the Ministry of Finance on the Finance Ministry's web portal and press conferences to provide official and timely information to the media and the people. At the same time, the Ministry of Finance has opened a question-and-answer section to receive and respond to people's opinions on the state budget.