P.M. Briceño Says 2023 Financial Plan is Taking Shape

The fiscal year 2023 is a little over two months away, but the Briceño administration is already working diligently to put together its annual financial plan for government’s expenditures.  While he concedes that the existing budget was initially based on austerity, Prime Minister John Briceño also admits that his administration has since expanded its fiscal allocations as monies became available.  But what is the Government of April doing ahead of April first.  Here’s what the Minister of Finance shared.

John Briceño

Prime Minister John Briceño

“We have to work with what we have.  [At] the beginning of this financial year, we made certain assumptions and so we had to tighten the budget, but as the time went by the revenues were increasing considerably so we had extra revenues to do some of the things that we had to do like hurricane and, you know, et cetera.  So that’s what we did this year, but in the coming year, I’ve been telling ministers that we have to be very strategic in our decision making to ensure that we look at what are the priorities in this new coming year.  That is why in the retreat with the cabinet and parliamentarians, we looked at what we are doing, we looked at Plan Belize, we looked at what we had that we promised and then we tried to come up with some priorities for this year and we hope that that can be reflected in the budget.  We have been working, the Ministry of Finance, the Financial Secretary, Minister Coye and myself, we have been working constantly with the different ministries, I know some of them have not been responding as quickly as we expected them to, but I sent out a notice on Friday urging all ministers to speak with their CEOs and their technical people to make sure that they can send the necessary information that we have.  When I was in opposition, what I was… I was not criticizing just the increase in expenditure.  I was criticizing that there was no real economic plan and that the government was just spending money for spending.  Now we have a plan.”