Changes in the De-Reservation of Monthly Recurrent Expenditure to Ministries, Departments
Patrick Faber
As you have heard, the economy continues to shrink and with it, hundreds more join the unemployment numbers. Government is struggling with an astronomical monthly wage bill of forty-five million dollars and another forty-five million dollars in operating expenses. The Public Service Union and the Belize National Teachers Union have agreed to forego increments as part of cost saving measures, but recurrent expenditures remain a huge problem for government. On Tuesday, the Financial Secretary, Joseph Waight wrote to the Ministries on another measure that government is taking. The monthly de-reservations, which are spread out in payments over a period of twelve months, will be reduced. A memo states “effective June first, and until further notice, de-reservation of monthly recurrent expenditure funds to ministries and departments except for Personal Emoluments will be reduced from one twelfth to one-twentieth of the approved estimates.” Today, the Minister of Education, Patrick Faber, chimed in on the issue.
Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
“I don’t know that it is to cut spending even more; it is to kinda formalize and to say to ministries this is what you have to work with. I was one of those ministers who asked the prime minister, well how is it that we are to operate. Because I think it is no secret that the income, the revenue for the government, is cut; in fact, you’ve heard it that it is more than half of the income that we are not getting in these times. And how is it that we are to operate in our ministry if we don’t know exactly how much monies are going to come. So what the memorandum sent from the Financial Secretary says is that these monies used to be disbursed in one twelfth payments, which signifies the number of months in the year. Every month, you get one-twelfth of the sum allocated for that particular expenditure line in your budget. Well now, it is going to be cut to one-twentieth, so you only get one-twentieth every month of what the total sum is. And that gives us an understanding of what monies exists. Tomorrow morning, we are going to meet with department heads and key players in our ministry to look at things and say okay, this is what is afforded to us. Can we—and we’ve asked for permission to do this—can we re-juggle things to cover those priority areas that we in the ministry believe. We have school feeding, we have school transportation, we have text books, we have subsidies, we have CXC payments—all of these things are budgeted for in our budget, but we are only going to get so much money so we asked for that opportunity and I supposed that other ministries will do the same. They will then sit down and prioritize where they believe that kind of spending ought to happen.”
The Financial Secretary also called on A.O.s at the ministries to ensure that the monies are spent wisely. The quantum of the savings, which the cuts will yield, is not known at this time since budgets vary at the various ministries with the Ministry of Education getting the biggest slice of the pie.
