P What transparency?? Give Me Tools To Do The Job, Says Federal Budget Monitor Parliament’s Budget Office says it faces inadequate funding and persistent concealment of federal financial records by “legally questionable” means. The Office in a blunt Annual Report said Canadians are denied full disclosure of government spending. “It seems in other places they are taking this exercise a little more seriously,” said Prof. Geneviève Tellier of the University of Ottawa; “In the U.K. it is mandatory for governments to use independent forecasts when they do their own budgets.” The Canadian office in its 2014 Report On Activities noted its budget remains frozen at six-year old levels; it has a staff of only fifteen people; and it faces repeated stonewalling from officialdom over government accounts. “The fact the government does not disclose the details of direct program expenses or reconcile the budget and estimates continue to pose challenges for effective fiscal oversight,” wrote Budget Officer Jean-Denis Fréchette; ““The provision of detailed information itself is not sufficient.” “Parliament may consider strengthening the Parliamentary Budget Office by addressing legally questionable refusals to provide the Office with the data to which it is entitled and granting it funding commensurate with the demands placed upon it,” Fréchette wrote. The Office has a budget of $2.8 million, a fraction of funding provided to a comparable agency in the Australian parliament ($10.2 million) and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office ($44 million). Report On Activities noted the Budget Officer’s finances also pale by comparison to partisan think-tanks like the Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives, which spends $5.3 million annually, and the Fraser Institute ($10.2 million). “The Parliamentary Budget Officer is non-partisan,” the Report concluded. “He and his team conduct analysis for standing committees and parliamentarians without regard to their political affiliation”; “He is not influenced by donors or beholden to a particular political ideology.” Kevin Page, former budget chief who inaugurated the office in 2006, said Parliament should conduct an independent review of the office. “It would be a good practice to have its work reviewed by an external evaluator as is the practice in other countries like the U.K.,” said Page, now Jean-Luc Pépin Research Chair at the University of Ottawa’s faculty of social sciences. The Budget Office in the past year published a series of critical reports on federal spending, including revelations that cabinet failed to provide money required to clean up contaminated industrial and military sites; inflated claims of high salaries in the public sector; grossly over-estimated the number of jobs that would result from a Small Business Job Credit program; and misrepresented the cost of building new navy patrol ships. blacklocks.ca/give-me-tools-to-do-the-job-says-federal-budget-monitor/
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 06:34:25 +0000
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