Abstract
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Fiscal (budget) transparency has been recently defined by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the clarity, reliability, frequency, timeliness, and relevance of public fiscal reporting and the openness to the public of the government’s fiscal policy-making process (IMF, 2012). Since budgets illustrate how public resources are used, budget transparency is promoted to facilitate policy analysis and to enhance accountability (IMF, 2014). An emerging body of literature witnesses the benefits of transparency for economic and governance outcomes, emphasizing that more transparent public finances are also characterized by better fiscal performance. Budget transparency is proven to facilitate accountability, contribute to the quality of governance and democracy, and promote public participation.
The complexity of budgets in modern economies allows the practices of hiding the real budget balance, taxes, overemphasize the benefits of spending and hide government liabilities since that could require future taxes. Since politicians have little incentives to disclose simple, clear, and transparent budgets on one hand and a moral obligation to their citizens to be transparent about their handling of taxpayers’ money on the other, accountability mechanisms are required to verify that governments meet their duties.
There are several methods and research approaches for measurement of budget transparency.
Blondal (2003) dissected the term on three components: a) the systematic and timely release of budget data; b) an effective role for the legislature and c) an effective role for civil society. Similarly, Open Budget Index (OBI) is widely spread methodology of the International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Initiative, a global research and advocacy program, which promotes budget transparency and public access to budget revenues and expenditures, and other relevant information. There are three pillars summing up the final score ranking; transparency, public participation and budget oversight. In 2019 Slovenia was ranked as 22nd among 117 countries and OBI index formed several recommendations for the Slovenian government in order to improve overall budget transparency according to achieved ranking. However, there are several important factors, which were not included in the OBI assessment procedure since the applied methodology did not consider the new internet portal (www.proracun.gov.si) introduced in January 2020 and the role of the Slovenian Fiscal Council as Slovenia’s independent fiscal institution (IFI).
This paper is striving to analyse the barriers for the implementation of the recommendations provided by the OBI assessment report. Since the Slovenian ranking has not been improved significantly in the last few years, the main aim of the paper is to isolate and evaluate the most important barriers to government budget transparency. The methodology of the paper is based on the on-line survey among practitioners (NGOs, journalists, members of the Parliament, senior officials, etc.) and academics dealing with the issues of budget transparency. The expected findings of the study should reveal the main barriers for the desired budget transparency and deeper systemic reasons for the emergence of barriers and deficiencies that prevent Slovenia's progress in this area. The first step towards improving the ranking of Slovenia could be to include the existing technological and institutional factors (IFI) in this field in the next OBI assessment.
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