The Agency for Identification Documents, Records and Data Exchange of Bosnia and Herzegovina (IDDEEA), as a budget user, duly and timely submitted its budget proposal to the Ministry of Finance and Treasury of Bosnia and Herzegovina, based on actual spending, valid contracts and obligations towards citizens and institutions.
“During the further process of budget development and adoption, which includes several state-level institutions, changes and reductions were made to certain budget items. IDDEEA has no insight into the stage at which and by which institution these changes were made. Therefore, at the time of the final adoption of the budget, IDDEEA was already in a financial deficit. The Agency does not adopt a budget and cannot change decisions imposed on it, nor influence the decisions of the bodies responsible for the budget process,” IDDEEA states.
In order to ensure minimal conditions for its functioning, IDDEEA has already submitted a request for restructuring its own budget, as well as a request for the allocation of additional funds from the budget reserve of BiH. Thus, the Agency, as stated in the statement, has exhausted all the possibilities given to it by law. Further decisions are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Council of Ministers of BiH.
“As a result of the imposed budget framework, we will find ourselves in a situation where it will not be possible to settle our obligations to suppliers on time, even though IDDEEA has fully fulfilled all its obligations. If someone believes that the state no longer needs personal documents, passports, license plates, driver’s licenses or the maintenance of information networks, then this is a decision of the institutions that create and adopt the budget, not the Agency,” the statement emphasizes.
Therefore, as the statement adds, this problem is not a problem of IDDEEA, but a problem of budget planning at the state level. The consequences of such decisions directly affect the citizens of BiH and all institutions to which IDDEEA provides services.
“At the same time, we want to clearly state that IDDEEA will not undertake anything that is outside its legal authority. We will act exclusively in accordance with the law and on the instructions of the Council of Ministers of BiH, which is responsible for creating the financial and operational framework within which the Agency operates,” the statement adds.
IDDEEA emphasizes that it will continue to professionally perform all tasks within its jurisdiction, but that citizens and institutions must know that the Agency bears the consequences of the budget that was allocated to it, and not the one that it requested and clearly explained.
“We emphasize once again that IDDEEA has completed its legal work: we submitted the budget proposal to the Ministry of Finance of BiH in accordance with all procedures. We do not know who, in the further decision-making chain – the Ministry of Finance of BiH, the Council of Ministers of BiH, the Presidency of BiH, the House of Representatives of BiH or the House of Peoples of BiH, changed these items,” IDDEEA stated in a press release.
