The Regional Office of U-LEAD with Europe in the Cherkasy oblast brought together municipal representatives from Cherkasy, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Sumy and Poltava oblasts to discuss the topic of “Implementation of Passports of Budget Programmes: Reporting and Performance Assessment”.
Assessment of the budget programme performance must be conducted at all stages of the budget process and includes monitoring and analysis of the use of funds and control over their targeted and effective use. This was stated by Mykola Hulko, Advisor on Municipal Finance and Management at U-LEAD.
According to him, municipalities should keep in mind that the budget programme performance still needs to be assessed even during martial law. After all, this kind of assessment is a key stage of effective management. It facilitates the increase in the transparency of the budget process by informing the public about the findings of the assessment and ensuring the best benefit-cost ratio.
Performance assessment also helps to review the measures, targets and indicators of the budget programme both during its implementation and planning stages, in the next budget period as well as for the medium term. Another advantage of budget performance assessment is the timely prevention of possible problems related to the implementation of the programme and the development of measures to improve cost-effectiveness.
“To date, there is no single methodology for assessing the performance of budget programmes for local budgets. The most widely used method is comparative analysis, which allows for comparison of the effectiveness of the use of budget funds and the results achieved by different administrators as they implement the same type of programmes,” said Mykola Hulko.
According to him, this method is implemented by the chief administrators of the funds of the local budget and is based on the average performance indices of performance indicators (efficiency and quality) in accordance with Letter of the Ministry of Finance “Methodology of Comparative Analysis of the Budget Programme Performance Implemented by Administrators of Local Budget Funds” No. 31-05110-14-5/27468 dated 19 September 2013.