Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz holds it like his predecessor: the black zero, a budget without new debt, remains the goal of the SPD politician. He also wants to make do without net borrowing for the coming year.
But managing the balanced budget is becoming increasingly difficult in the current situation. In contrast to previous years, when the Confederation was always able to rely on new tax revenues at record levels, this is no longer the case in view of the restrained economy and additional expenditure on climate protection.
To compensate for a structural deficit of 9.5 billion euros, the Ministry of Finance uses under Scholz a legal Buchungskniffs - the recourse to the so-called refugee or asylum reserve. It currently amounts to around 34 billion euros and has been invested in recent years from surpluses in the budget. However, the reserve has not yet been touched, because the good economic situation has enabled refugee aid to be financed from the current budget.
Now the Buchungskniff is criticized with the accumulated refugee reserve in a report of the Federal Court of Audit, which is the SPIEGEL and this week went to the housekeepers of the Bundestag.
- It states that the federal government wants to secure a budget without net borrowing, in which the "planned negative net borrowing of 9.5 billion euros in 2020 through withdrawals from the asylum reserve amounting to 9.2 billion euros (previous year: 5.5 Billions of euros) and to be covered by coin revenues of € 0.3 billion ".
- For the withdrawal from the asylum reserve, however, "financing on the capital market is required" because the federal government had not covered any financial assets at the time, the auditors describe the booking process.
However, an action by the federal government, which from the point of view of the examiners should be eliminated as far as possible. "The Federal Court of Auditors recommends that surpluses be used directly for debt reduction in the future and that there are no book-entry reserves that require borrowing," according to the report of the Bonn-based authority on 21 October.
Criticism of Scholz by FDP householder Otto Fricke
In parts of the opposition, the Federal Ministry of Finance's recourse to the refugee reserve has been criticized again and again for some time. The FDP budget politician Otto Fricke called the criticism of the Court of Auditors in the SPIEGEL "as hard as honest".
The FDP politician accused Finance Minister Scholz, with his "tricky detour" on the asylum and refugee reserve was his black zero "degenerated to zero for a long time already".
The Federal Court of Audit therefore legitimately puts its finger in the wound and points to the already existing and foreseeable further increasing debt of the federal government. According to Fricke's demand, the finance minister must finally be honest and turn around if he does not want to go down in the history books soon with the budget 2020 as "debt Scholz".
