Malaysia's National Budget Office seeks IDEAS' input for Budget 2020

KUALA LUMPUR (Sept 11): Malaysia's National Budget Office (NBO) had last month sought the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs' (IDEAS) inputs on institutional reforms for the Budget 2020 speech.

IDEAS said in a statement today it presented several recommendations on eight issues related to integrity and transparency of the budget, which will be announced on Oct 11 this year.

"Among the issues and recommendations that were discussed are on the areas of political financing, government procurement, fiscal responsibility, federal-state fiscal allocation, subsidies and the Bumiputera agenda. The underlying principle behind most of the recommendations provided was for the government to practise disclosure, transparency and accountability in its decision-making processes. IDEAS also made a few recommendations on how the government should improve their score in the open budget survey (OBS) that will be published by the end of 2019.

"Suggestions on improving the OBS include to publish certain documents such as the mid-year review, the pre-budget statement and the citizen's budget in the next cycle, improve the comprehensiveness of the enacted budget, and to improve the executive budget proposal, which consists of the budget speech, anggaran perbelanjaan kerajaan persekutuan, anggaran hasil kerajaan persekutuan and economic report," IDEAS said.

Anggaran perbelanjaan kerajaan persekutuan is translated as the federal government's estimated expenditure while anggaran hasil kerajaan persekutuan is translated as the federal government's estimated revenue.

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