The US Department of State Fiscal Transparency Report published, Monday in Washington, highlighted Morocco’s fiscal transparency amongst a minority of countries in the world that meet the minimum requirements of fiscal transparency, while stating that Algeria has made “no significant progress” in this respect.
Among the 141 governments evaluated by the State Department, only 76 of them met minimum requirements of fiscal transparency. For the purpose of this report, the minimum requirements of fiscal transparency include having key budget documents that are publicly available, substantially complete, and generally reliable.
The Department of State presents the Fiscal Transparency Report pursuant to Section 7031(b)(1) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs Appropriations Act, 2020 (Div. G, P.L. 116-94) (FY 2020 SFOAA).
The Joint Explanatory Statement accompanying the FY 2020 SFOAA defines “minimum requirements of fiscal transparency” to mean the public disclosure of national budget documentation (to include income and expenditures by ministry) as well as government contracts and licenses for natural resource extraction (to include bidding and concession allocation practices).
While Morocco has been able to meet these requirements thanks to substantial fiscal reforms, good governance and an orthodox public financial management all of which is accessible in the public domain, the Algerian government, stressed the State Department’s report, “maintained off-budget accounts, and though they were subject to public audits, government efforts to reduce the number of off-budget accounts appeared to have slowed”.
The Algerian authorities, added the report, “did not publish an executive budget proposal or an end-of-year report within a reasonable period of time”, during the review period (January to December 2019), noting that “limited information regarding debt obligations (in Algeria) was publicly available. and that publicly available information did not provide a comprehensive treatment of allocations to and earnings from state-owned enterprises”.
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