PHILIPSBURG–United St. Maarten Party (US Party) has issued a call for postponement of the planned start of debate on the draft 2019 budget, citing that the budget is rushed, even less transparent than the last, lacks detail and, with expedited scheduling, does not allow adequate time for Members of Parliament to review it.
Debate on the draft budget in the Central Committee of Parliament is scheduled to start on Thursday, November 29.
MPs received the convocation for the upcoming meeting, supporting documents on a pending amendment to the 2018 budget and the draft 2019 budget from Parliament Chairwoman MP Sarah Wescot-Williams on November 23.
MPs have “less than four business days to review not just one but two very large and very important documents before beginning the debate. This time pressure is, in the opinion of our faction, totally unacceptable,” said US Party faction leader MP Rolando Brison.
He pointed that the 2018 budget amendment is 163 pages long and the draft 2019 budget is 197 pages. These are in addition to the advice from the Committee on Financial Supervision CFT.
The party calls for the parliament chairwoman to allow at least two weeks, ideally four weeks, between the times the documents related to the budget were received and the start of the debates on the topic, and to insist that the finance minister provides a fully expanded budget document to Parliament, just as it appears to have been given to other institutions that have received the budget.
The budget document should also be fully searchable as was requested and finally received by the party in the previous budget debate, said Brison. He also wants it verified with the Council of Advice that the document Parliament has received is identical to the one that the Council has reviewed.
“We do not see it at all feasible to have the budget debate process begin on Thursday, November 29. We hope in consideration of the evidence presented, the chair to postpone the convocation until all of these matters are addressed,” Brison said.
The party has also sent questions via letter to Finance Minister Perry Geerlings to which answers are requested ahead of a budget debate.
The National Accountability Ordinance was designed to provide Parliament with close to four months to review and approve the budget. The law highlights that Parliament must receive the budget by the second Tuesday in September. The same ordinance states that focus of the budgetary effort should be to allow Parliament until the end of the year to approve the budget.
“In the spirit of that law, it is clear that Parliament should not be rushed to handle the affairs of the budget, and should be afforded a chance to go over the budget with a fine-tooth comb,” Brison said.
Several items have not been given detailed breakdowns as in the 2018 budget, according to Brison.
“The last 2018 budget had much more detailed economic categories. Even the 2018 second budget amendment that you have proposed to be debated has much more detailed economic categories than the 2019 budget,” said Brison. “But what makes this even worse is the fact that it appears that the document as reviewed by the Council of Advice is actually different than the one submitted to parliament by the secretariat.”
The Council of Advice seems to refer to specific things in its advice that do not exist in the version of the budget that has been sent to Parliament, he said. An example of this is that in its advice, according to him, the Council was able to deduce on its own that ministers’ salaries have been cut by 10 per cent.
However, Brison said looking at the draft 2019 budget, it lacks detail per ministry. “It is totally impossible to calculate whether each minister has indeed cut their salaries by 10 per cent. This is because only the total of each economic category is displayed at the end; i.e., all salaries per ministry are given as a total, rather than broken down per department.”
Source: The Daily Herald https://www.thedailyherald.sx/islands/83081-us-party-seeks-budget-debate-postponement
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