Relevant bodies of Tajikistan are ordered to take measures to ensure transparency of the country’s basic financial document.
Improvement of the budget transparency will be one of key priorities of the Tajikistan Public Finance Management Strategy for the Period to 2030 (Strategy).
“Due to lack or inaccessibility of regular reviews and audit report Tajikistan has received a low rating in in the Open Budget Index,” says the Strategy, which was endorsed by president’s decree of January 31, 2020.
The document notes that in 2017, the Open Budget Index ranked Tajikistan with 30 scores 81st among 102 nations.
According to the Strategy authors, the ranking shows that the country’s public is not sufficiently involved in the budget process.
“The Open Budget Index shows that much more needs to be improved for the purpose of strengthening integrity and accountability in the use of public financial resources and it is necessary to take meausres to ensure transparency of the budget,” the document sys.
The Open Budget Index is the world’s only independent, comparative measure of central government budget transparency. The Index assigns countries covered by the Open Budget Survey a transparency score on a 100-point scale using a subset of questions that assess the amount and timeliness of budget information that governments make publicly available in eight key budget documents in accordance with international good practice standards. Each country is given a score between 0 and 100 that determines its ranking. The Open Budget Index 2017 showed a modest decline in average global budget transparency scores, from 45 in 2015 to 43 in 2017 for the 102 countries that were surveyed in both rounds. This decline is in stark contrast to the average increase of roughly two points documented in each round of the survey between 2008 and 2015.
A budget is a government’s plan on the use public resources to meet the citizens’ needs. Budget Transparency (BT) means that ordinary citizens and civil society organizations (CSOs) can access information about how public resources are allocated and used. BT enables citizens to assess whether government officials are good stewards of public funds.
BT is a fundamental precondition for accountability and public participation in governance processes. Lack of transparency and democratic control of budget processes creates opportunities for graft and corruption.
A non-transparent budget can neither be properly analyzed nor can its implementation be effectively monitored. Transparency allows citizens to provide inputs into the budget process and to assess whether a government executed the development plans in accordance with budgetary allocations.
