Vera Daves: budget is not just a guide, it's to comply

Vera Daves was speaking at a workshop on "The Internal Control System" in which she addressed issues related to the control of budget execution, pointing out the main infractions of the rules and their consequences.

In her intervention, the minister added that it is important to be pedagogical and alert to the risks of non-compliance that do not always happen in bad faith, but called for respect for the bible of public finances, which is the General State Budget."

"As much as, at times, the temptation is great, not to comply with what is stated in the bible, it is our responsibility as internal control bodies that have to monitor the execution of the OGE to be vigilant and alert that what is meant to be accomplished, it is not a dead letter", stressed the governor.

"We shouldn't have the OGE just as a mere guiding guide, that's a budget to comply with", she reinforced, alerting to the consequences of non-compliance, namely the deterioration of public accounts, which affect people.

"At the end of the day, we have our grandchildren and great-grandchildren paying debts for things they don't even know what it is. The consequences are in people's lives, it's not just paper, it's not numbers, it's about lives," he said. Is it over there.

Vera Daves urged "everyone to be vigilant" to detect deviations from the legality of the effectiveness and efficiency of public financial management, as it is not only important to carry out expenditure, complying with all the principles and criteria, but also to seek to hire the best possible service.

"Often, we do everything right, but then after all there is an arrangement behind it that doesn't benefit those who have access to a given good or service," she noted.

Therefore, she emphasized, "the problem is not always little money, often the problem is to make the right choices with the resources we have at our disposal and for that we have to be rigorous in identifying the best price-quality binomial".

"That's why it's important, open contracting procedures, electronic public procurement, international public tenders, competition, that's why it's important to be transparent," she exemplified.

"If we always have to hide, show half-truths, and then we are in a hurry, everything is urgent, everything is for yesterday, we will never be sure if we hired the best service, good or contract at the best possible price", he added, also stressing the importance of planning and scheduling while maintaining focus.

"You can't change three or four times along the way, obviously life is dynamic, but three or four budgets can't come up in the same year because the manager has changed his mind. But why? There has to be an explanation," continued the holder of the Finance portfolio.

The minister also added that the ministry defends the emergence of a medium-term expenditure framework to "think three years" and have guiding guidelines in the programming to "have the fewest possible surprises".