Supreme Audit Office of the Slovak Republic

Bratislava, February 3, 2022 – Despite the long-term declared effort to apply the rules of program budgeting in the public administration, this strategic form of creating and auditing the realization of the public budget's intentions works in a limited extent. After 20 years since the creation of the state budget was started in accordance with the principles of program budgeting, the government and the ministries as well do not use its main advantage, which is a comprehensive view of defining and evaluating the expenditures of the state and public corporations. In order for the process not to be formal, it is important not only to initially set the intentions and goals of the individual programs, but also to monitor their implementation, as well as to monitor and evaluate the implementation of the overall goals. This problem concerns the evaluation of the budget in the horizon of the year as well as in the medium term, respectively. three-year plans.

"It is the feedback about the practical realization of the defined goals that is missing. Therefore, we cannot say whether the spent funds were used effectively and whether the original intention based on the sustainable development of the company was achieved. Among other things, we have identified the problem in insufficient coordination of rules on the part of the Ministry of Finance, which is in charge of program budgeting," emphasized the President of the Supreme Audit Office (SAO) of the Slovak Republic Ľubomír Andrassy. "When approving the budget, members of parliament give individual ministries and public corporations imaginary envelopes with finances to realize not only their ordinary, but mainly strategic goals. As part of the subsequent accounting of the budget, the envelopes are returned empty and without information about what has actually been achieved, what specific benefit citizens or society feel from the implementation of the project,”  the head of the Slovak auditors described the current budget setting. According to Andrassy, ??at least medium-term planning is largely formal in Slovakia, and our country still operates on unsustainable annual budget intentions.

The full text of the press release about this issue in Slovak language is available here. Use the Google icon in the top bar for automatic translation.