MoFEC lauds cost saving measures as public agencies host their own events

The Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation (MoFEC) announced that since their new policy restricting ‘unnecessary expenditures’ was implemented 370 million birr has been returned to the public coffers. During his recent 2018/19 budget speech Abraham Tekeste (PhD), Minister of MoFEC, said that the new policy is saving the public a lot of money.
MoFEC has been strongly advocating for  public offices to use their budgets properly  and stated that for the most part they must hold events at their own venues as opposed to hotels or resorts.
Since then federal offices have undertaken events in their own facilities at a minimal cost.
Abraham said that public offices have been able to save on unnecessary costs. He said that since the new strategy was applied 370 million birr has been moved back from public offices to the coffer.
“Now that the new strategy has been applied people have become more aware about the importance of saving but there is still waste that we need to cut we need to implement methods to tighten the controlling mechanism,” he said.
The minister stated that financial constraints have been observed on the current budget year which ends July 7. He said that some of the public projects have been postponed for another period due to lack of funds. In the budget year the government has been failed to collect over 50 billion birr that it planned to collect from taxes and related sources.
This year tax collection was 11.6 percent of the GDP, whereas last year it was nearly 13 percent.
The government is eager for taxes to be at least 17pct of GDP at the end of the GTP period in 2020.
At the end of the GTP period the government plans to earn half a trillion birr from taxes and related sources.
This coming fiscal year the budget tabled to parliament would increase by 3.6 percent which is a smaller rate than previous years. If the budget is compared with the preceding year in terms of hard currency it has decreased because the government has been applied a 15 percent devaluation on the birr from major hard currencies. MoFEC has tabled 347 billion birr for the upcoming fiscal year’s budget. The federal capital expenditure has declined by 4.4 percent or one billion birr compared with the current budget year. The debt settlement amount is 22.5 billion birr, which was 16 billion birr for the current year.