Baseline budgeting finances government waste11/26/2023 ![]() This is not to diminish the crucial role that financial transaction and process expertise play in federal agencies, but when federal finance teams are focused primarily on compliance and reporting, it’s harder for them to support more strategic decision making. However, narrowly focusing on financial compliance can obscure financial transparency, thwart agility, and stymie the potential for fruitful collaborations between the finance team and other parts of the organization. That already considerable strain on capacity is often exacerbated by additional reporting requirements to senior, external government organizations. Enabling strategic decision makingįor many federal agencies, the year-round activities of budgeting and ensuring legal and regulatory compliance typically absorb the bulk of the finance team’s time, attention, and resources. They can help leaders develop a “decision making” view of finances and automate reporting to “close the books” sooner, creating more capacity for finance teams to partner with operations and tie financial resources directly to mission outcomes. In the 21st century, however, digital tools have opened up a new horizon of opportunity for the public sector. Government agencies have long sought to bring clarity and transparency to their large and complicated budgets indeed, this was a major focus of congressional oversight and department-level regulations as early as the 1960s. What is driving costs up and what can we do to reduce them?īuilding internal financial tools can help answer all these questions by boosting financial management agility and transparency.What are the true, fully loaded costs of our key outputs?.What percentage of fiscal flexibility do we have in our budget and how can we double it?.Which costs are truly fixed and which ones are adjustable?.Costs are going up for federal governments too, yet agencies and departments may not register that decrease in buying power for months or even years, making it harder for them to deliver on missions and maximize the impact of taxpayer funds.Īlthough this current inflationary period will pass, it highlights a perennial question for government leaders: How can we deliver more to the people we serve with the budget we have? In our experience across the US federal government, we’ve heard agency heads and other leaders ask questions such as the following: 1 World economic outlook, October 2022: Countering the cost-of-living crisis, International Monetary Fund, October 11, 2022. It also covers emerging areas in infrastructure governance, such as maintaining and managing public infrastructure assets and building resilience against climate change.Throughout the world, people have been seeing higher prices at the grocery store, the gas pump, and elsewhere in their daily lives, and many are adjusting how they budget in response. It covers critical issues such as infrastructure investment and Sustainable Development Goals, controlling corruption, managing fiscal risks, integrating planning and budgeting, and identifying best practices in project appraisal and selection. Use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this PDF fileĭrawing on the Fund’s analytical and capacity development work, including Public Investment Management Assessments (PIMAs) carried out in more than 60 countries, the new book Well Spent: How Strong Infrastructure Governance Can End Waste in Public Investment will address how countries can attain quality infrastructure outcomes through better infrastructure governance-an issue becoming increasingly important in the context of the Great Lockdown and its economic consequences. Well Spent: How Strong Infrastructure Governance Can End Waste in Public Investment
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