Monitoring Report on the Transparency and Accountability of The Budget Users

We begin this note to you with two citations that reflect our understanding of what public money and public spending is, and why in a democratic society it is necessary the information available to the state to be made public. We believe that in Macedonia there is almost no understanding, that the budget available to the Government and other state and public institutions are not their financial means, but as the former British Prime Minister Margaret Tacher stated, it is the taxpayers’ money, because governments do not have their own money. Therefore, we believe and we emphasize that the state and the public officials must be aware that they have to constantly inform and be accountable to the citizens for the amount of public money available, how the public money is spent and what are the results achieved by spending of the public money. Thus, we conducted a monitoring of the degree of transparency and publicity of the budget users’ public money and a research on how the budget users evaluate the effects and the results of their work. The information in a digitally developed 21st century provides easy and simple opportunities for the state and the public function holders to achieve transparency and accountability for the spending of public money. By monitoring the websites of 60 public institutions, we found out that an overwhelming small number of institutions use their websites to be accountable to the public. Through the second part of the research with similar findings, we found that in most of the institutions, the creation of the budget does not include a methodological evaluation of the budget proposals. This report is one of a series of activities we take to appeal to the Government, the state institutions and to the public that "their" budgets are subject to transparency, publicity, accountability and results from spending public money.