Damascus-SANA
The People’s Assembly, in its session held today, headed by Speaker Hammouda Sabbagh, referred the government’s two financial statements on the two draft laws on the final account of the state’s general budget for the fiscal years 2014 and 2015 to the Budget and Accounts Committee to study them and prepare the necessary reports on them.
During the session, the council discussed the two statements and the two aforementioned bills, where the Minister of Finance, Dr. Kinan Yaghi, explained that the decline in spending on investment credits during 2014 and 2015 was due, as stated in the justification memoranda to public authorities, to the directives of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in the years 2011, 2013 and 2014 to rationalize spending and stop indirect projects in them. The implementation rate is less than 60 percent.
Minister Yaghi also mentioned the recommendations of the Supreme Council for Planning during the year 2013 related to the implementation of training and qualification processes internally, as a large part of the training contracts were made with public sector entities that are characterized by high equipment and moderate prices, and some external training courses were canceled at the time and training was limited to internal courses.
The Minister of Finance indicated that one of the reasons for the low spending on investment credits is also the bad economic conditions and the siege imposed on the country in 2014, the inability to implement foreign contracts, security conditions and the control of terrorist organizations over some government headquarters, in addition to the failure of tenders and advertisements for more than one time and poor funding as a result of the current conditions and delays. Car import procedures through the Foreign Trade Corporation.
Minister Yaghi stressed that the government is continuing to work on completing the file of accumulation in cutting the accounts of the state's general budget and submitting it to the People's Assembly upon completion.
In their interventions, a number of members called for expediting the preparation of cutting the state’s general budget accounts for the fiscal years 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, noting that the policy that was followed during 2014 and 2015 by the Central Bank of Syria relied on pumping large quantities of foreign exchange into the market from the currency reserves. Instead of rationalizing its use and limiting itself to financing imports from basic needs.
Some members pointed out that there was an exaggeration in the request for appropriations during the two years mentioned by the departments, and that the responsible for the low rates of implementation of current and investment operations should be identified, indicating that it was supposed to adopt exceptional solutions in line with the situation at the time when setting any budget.
In his response to the members’ interventions, the Minister of Finance indicated that the reasons for the delay in issuing cut accounts during the years from 2014 to 2020 are due to the conditions of the terrorist war and the loss of documents, bonds and papers related to the expenditures of public authorities, which must be ratified by the Central Organization for Financial Control in order to achieve tracking and control over Spending, implementing budgets, and holding accountable the parties that had the appropriate conditions to implement their projects and did not implement them, whether in terms of mismanagement or the use of funds.
The session, which was attended by Minister of State for People's Assembly Affairs Abdullah Abdullah, was adjourned to 12 o'clock tomorrow, Tuesday.