At The End Of The Year, The Strange Phenomenon Of Spending Money Suddenly Arrived As Scheduled

The November fiscal revenue and expenditure data released by the Ministry of Finance on November 11th showed that in the first 11 months of this year, the national fiscal expenditure at all levels was 12.6 trillion yuan, only 82.5% of the annual budget was completed. This means that the fiscal expenditure of nearly 2.7 trillion yuan needs to be completed in December, which is two to three times the amount of fiscal expenditure in normal months. The "surprise spending" at the end of the year has come as scheduled. Experts said that this phenomenon is expected to gradually improve with the gradual implementation and implementation of such methods as incorporating the surplus funds of public institutions into the budget of the next year.

The most important reason why "sudden spending" at the end of the year has been the focus of public opinion for many years is the inefficient use of financial funds, which may "breed corruption" and bring a lot of waste.

According to the annual budget system currently implemented in China, the local balance is directly handed in every year; In addition, the "base method" is widely used in budgeting in China. If there is a surplus in last year's budget, the base of the next year's budget will be reduced, which is a "loss" for local governments. "The local government has to spend all the extra money, because if it doesn't spend all of it, it is not its own," said several local officials.

"According to the 2014 financial budget, 17.5% of the budget expenditure will be completed in the last month of this year. The phenomenon of" sudden spending "at the end of the year was more serious three or four years ago. In December, about 20% of the annual expenditure budget will be spent in one month. It has improved in recent years." Wang Dehua, a researcher of the Institute of Finance, Economy and Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told reporters.

Li Quan, an associate researcher of the Finance Research Institute of the Ministry of Finance, said in an interview that "spending money at the end of the year is both a natural law and an artificial factor. First of all, it is not the financial department that is concentrating on "spending money" at the end of the year, but the government at all levels and relevant units have a relatively large amount of settlement at the end of the year, which normally leads to a large amount of centralized settlement of funds; Secondly, because the budget expenditures of some budget companies have not been completed, or they have been completed but not settled in time, the budget of the next year may be reduced, which leads to centralized settlement of all budget companies in this period. "

In Wang Dehua's view, one of the main reasons for this problem is that the budget was approved by the National People's Congress and people's congresses at all levels late. "The National People's Congress usually approves the budget only in March, which has a great impact on the progress of expenditure." Wang Dehua also said: "In addition, many of our funds are distributed in the form of project expenditure, which has problems such as secondary distribution, project start-up time lag, etc. In addition, there is a delay in the transfer payment from the superior finance to the subordinate finance, which also affects the progress of capital expenditure."

In fact, in order to avoid "sudden spending" at the end of the year, the Ministry of Finance issued the Notice on Further Strengthening the Implementation and Management of Fiscal Expenditure Budget in May this year, requiring local governments to strengthen fiscal expenditure. Subsequently, the progress of central and local fiscal expenditure has been significantly improved.

In November this year, the national fiscal expenditure was 1275.9 billion yuan, an increase of 10.1 billion yuan or 0.8% over the same month last year. Among them, the central government's expenditure at the same level was 149.3 billion yuan, down 9.9% year on year, mainly due to factors such as early appropriation of some key expenditures. This also reflects the efforts and achievements made by the financial department in solving the problem of "sudden spending" at the end of the year.

Li Quan told reporters that to solve the problem of "sudden spending" at the end of the year, first, the budget unit should strictly implement the budget, effectively smooth the fluctuation of funds, and strive to match the actual settlement with the budget data; Second, the financial department should strictly assess the performance of budget implementation, supervise and deal with poor implementation, and constantly improve Financial funds Efficiency. Of course, in the final analysis, it is necessary to implement the expenditure corresponding to the authority responsibility And finally achieve a high matching of budget revenue and expenditure.

"At present, with the gradual implementation and implementation of such methods as incorporating the surplus funds of public institutions into the budget of the next year, the situation of spending money at the end of the year will be better solved," said Li Quan. Many experts pointed out that China should carry out medium-term budget reform, formulate multi-year budget, and strengthen budget The incentive and restraint mechanism in the process systematically curbs the impulse of "sudden spending" at the end of the year.

Compared with "urging spending" in order to prevent "sudden spending", experts pointed out that governments at all levels should increase their supervision on the possible problems of large spending at the end of the year. "The year-end 'surprise spending' is a comprehensive response to the budget system and the financial expenditure structure. 'surprise spending' should be opposed, but it should not only focus on the proportion of year-end expenditure. More importantly, it should take improving the performance of financial funds and reducing waste as the main goal, and the core is to control expenditure efficiency."