Page 2017 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 June 1993
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PUBLIC ACCOUNTS - STANDING COMMITTEE
Report on Monitoring of Budget Supplementation
MR KAINE (12.20): I present report No. 3 of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts entitled Monitoring of Budget Supplementation by the Legislative Assembly, together with extracts of the minutes of proceedings. I move:
That the report be noted.
Members will recall that, at the last Estimates Committee, a view was expressed that the Public Accounts Committee could look into the ways in which a budget is supplemented and consider whether this is in the best interests of the ACT. On the basis of that recommendation, the Public Accounts Committee resolved to look at the matter. The Assembly currently scrutinises any expenditure proposals at program level through the medium of the examination of the Appropriation Bill, both on the floor of the house and in the Estimates Committee. However, during the year many changes occur, and the Assembly is advised of those changes after the event rather than before. Usually, the expenditure has already been made, and the reporting often occurs in the following fiscal year; so it becomes a matter of reporting history. The members of the committee were concerned that this ought to change.
There are, essentially, four ways in which an agency's budget can be supplemented. They can get additional money from the Treasurer's Advance or they can arrange a transfer between two different programs within the budget. In both of those cases, the Assembly has already appropriated the money. It is simply being used in a different way than was originally anticipated. The other two ways in which a budget can be supplemented are either by receiving additional Commonwealth payments - the simple onpassing of money coming from the Commonwealth - or by appropriations under section 5 of the Supply Act and the Appropriation Act, which essentially allows the Government to pay wage increases that were not foreseen at the time the budget was prepared. In those latter two cases, it is money additional to what was appropriated by the Assembly in the first place, although section 5 of the Supply and Appropriation Acts permits the Government to supplement their salary and wages bills.
We examined each of these four ways in which a budget can be supplemented. The one that attracted most attention from the committee was transactions on the Treasurer's Advance. The committee noted with interest that it was only in March of this year, some months after the inquiry had begun, that Treasury put out a paper entitled "Principles and Guidelines to Budget Supplementation". That paper changes the way in which supplementation from the Treasurer's Advance has been put into effect in the past, and I will deal with that in a minute.
The way this augmentation from the advance can be made is interesting. Subsection 47(3) of the Audit Act, for example, provides that there can be augmentation and that the appropriation to the Minister's Advance may be increased by an amount not exceeding 5 per cent of the total amount appropriated by the Appropriation Act. If you think about that for a minute, it refers to 5 per cent of the total amount appropriated by the Appropriation Act.
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