By Nevena Šarenac
Today in Sarajevo, a round table on topic ‘Application of system access to budget data from one place’ was held with the aim to improve the communication and continued dialogue concerning the budget issues.
This round table is a part of the project ‘Enabling the access to budget data from one place’ whose aim is to start wide debates on efficiency, priorities and influence of the process of determining budget in BiH.
The value of the two-year project ‘Enabling c which is being realized from January is 127 722 EUR, with 99 000 EUR from the EU Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights for 2011.
Deputy Head of the EU Delegation to BiH Renzo Daviddi noted the importance of the budget that has to fulfil a certain number of characteristics, and one of them is budget transparency.
‘One of the aims of this project is to stress out the importance of transparency in budget planning. Citizens and experts will have use from unobstructed insight to budget. In every moment citizens will be able to see how the budget of their municipality looks like and how the money is being spent, and the experts will be able to access data on which they’ll be able to analyse budget fields of interest to them’, said Daviddi to journalist before the beginning of the round table ‘Application of system access to budget data from one place’, which was held in the building of the EU Delegation to BiH.
Daviddi noted that the fiscal policy is the only element that is developed in BiH, while the accession to these date is still underdeveloped.
He noted that BIH has a very badly consolidated state account, which is a very bad basis for enabling to see how much money is there to spend.
The executive manager of the Centre for Promotion of Public Interest Damir Mehmedbašić noted that finishing the project ‘Enabling the access to budget data from one place’ will allow BIH citizens to have access to all budgets in one place, for the first time.
He added that they’ll have the access to budgets of 143 municipalities, 10 cantons, two entities, BIH and Brčko District.
According to him, citizens will be able to acquaint themselves with extra-budget funds which were neglect, at the new web site in preparation.
‘In order to adequately fight against corruption, we would need an analytical access to data base, as well as tracking all transactions above 5000 BAM’, said Mehmedbašić.
