Go to any chambers inside the ministry, be it minister´s and secretary´s waiting rooms or the chamber of joint secretary of the budget division, scene of lawmakers, quite often with a group of followers, waiting for appointments with the officials to get their projects included in the budget is common.
In my fifteen years career at the Ministry of Finance, I have never seen so large number of lawmakers visiting the ministry to sanction budget for development projects in their constituencies, said a front officer at the ministry.
Roughly almost 200 of the total 601 lawmakers tasked with writing a new democratic constitution have so far visited the Ministry of Finance at least once to put pressure on the concerned officials to release resources for their constituencies. On an average, around 25 lawmakers visit the ministry every day, said front officer at the ministry.
Interestingly, lawmakers not only put pressure on the officials to include the project in the new budget, but some of them also demand a letter explicitly stating that they played the most crucial role in including the project in the budget and sanctioning required resources, said a high-ranking official involved in budget preparation.
The culture of bypassing the standard process under which line ministries are required to forward the project proposal to the National Planning Commission for approval after an in-depth assessment of their financial and social implications has grown alarmingly, said the officer.
What the lawmakers should understand is that even if the projects are included in the budget under pressure from them, the projects will not get implemented since they neither have ownership at central level nor are they backed by any feasibility study at the local level, he said.
Another worrying trend that seems to be gradually taking shape is that the precious national resources meant for high-priority projects are being drained out for low priority and sometimes unnecessary projects that hardly have any economic sense.
The practice of using national resources in order to secure political support for the coalition government is a dangerous trend and this must end, said the official.
Almost all the outside experts do agree that financial discipline at the Ministry of Finance is gradually eroding. The most troublesome thing according to a budget consultant, is not that financial discipline is weakening, but there is a lack of political will to stop the ticking financial time bomb, said a budget consultant.
Soaring unplanned expenditures that lack minimum financial accountability, uncontestable political pressure to earmark budgets for projects whose financial viability has never been assessed and growing practices of allocating resources to serve fragile political equation are some of the examples of financial indiscipline.
Hardly a month in office, the new Minister of Finance Surendra Pandey has already sanctioned non-budgetary expenditure worth Rs 360 million and concerned officials fear that the amount can touch Rs 500 million mark by the end of the current fiscal year. "Though the minister understands the fiscal implications of such expenditure, pressures coming from the ruling coalition, particularly from the small partners, are so immense that they can hardly be ignored," said the official.
Even former finance minister Dr Babu Ram Bhattarai, who served for nine months, also sanctioned a record unplanned expenditure worth Rs 1.04 billion.
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