On August 19, the National Assembly discussed in groups the direction for building the draft Law on State Budget (unified).
At the discussion session, Politburo Member, National Assembly Chairman Tran Thanh Man assessed that the directions of this amendment are basically aimed at solving institutional bottlenecks, ensuring synchronization between laws on state budget and public investment, meeting development requirements in the new context.
The State Budget Law and the Law on Public Investment are both newly amended, but the requirement for high growth, along with the organization of a two-level local government model, continues to raise the requirement to strongly innovate the methods of management, allocation and use of resources.
The National Assembly Chairwoman said that one of the issues that needs to be overcome is that the budget model and plan still have many levels, and the process is lengthy, reducing the proactiveness of local authorities.
This also creates a barrier between recurrent expenditure and investment expenditure with the situation of not being able to use recurrent expenditure to repair and upgrade small public assets or prepare investment projects, causing widespread disbursement congestion.
According to the National Assembly Chairwoman, the central policy of the draft Law on State Budget (integrated) is to innovate budget decentralization and increase local autonomy.
At the same time, improve the mechanism for dividing revenue sources, clearly distinguishing between central budget revenue sources enjoying 100%, local budgets enjoying 100% and revenue items divided by percentage, increasing proactiveness for dynamic cities.
The National Assembly Chairwoman also proposed to flexibly define the boundaries between development investment and recurrent expenditure; allow the use of recurrent funds for small-scale investment tasks such as renovation, upgrading, expansion, repair of existing public assets, procurement of equipment and working vehicles.
Planning, appraisal and project investment transfer need to be defined based on the nature and objectives instead of the applied capital source. It is necessary to implement on the principle of centralized public investment capital for large infrastructure projects, creating new production capacity; while recurrent expenditures serve to maintain operation and improve the efficiency of existing assets.
The National Assembly Chairwoman also said that it is necessary to shift to budget management based on output results, shifting from allocation based on input documents to capital allocation based on KPI.
The Central Government only controls the budget ceiling, the target results, then the Heads of budget-using units, which are ministries, branches, and provincial-level People's Committees, must be fully responsible for the efficiency of spending within the assigned resources" - the National Assembly Chairwoman emphasized.
The National Assembly Chairwoman also said that it is necessary to improve the mechanism for allocating national target programs, additional capital with targets, and apply a full-package capital allocation mechanism, without detailed allocation to each small project at the central level.
Discussing in groups, delegate Tran Hoang Ngan (Delegation of National Assembly Deputies of Ho Chi Minh City) expressed his approval of merging the State Budget Law with the Investment Law.
Contributing specific opinions on decentralization and delegation of power, this person said that current draft laws need to thoroughly grasp the spirit of "localities decide, localities do, localities take responsibility".
For public investment projects using local budgets, delegates proposed to implement in the direction of "complete decentralization", giving more full proactive rights to localities in deciding, organizing implementation and linking with local responsibilities.
In addition to investment capital from the state budget, the delegate also proposed that the draft continue to review and clarify the content related to state capital invested in enterprises to ensure a full coverage of the management scope of state resources.
