In January, spiraling government spending had produced a $4 million deficit in the general fund, the government’s locally generated spending account. But with Finance controlling travel and supply spending over the past four months, the deficit has been reduced to $2.3 million, Alfred said.
“Our goal is zero deficit this year,” said Alfred, who took over at the Ministry of Finance in January.
If the Marshall Islands can accomplish this goal, it will reverse an eight-year trend of general fund deficits.
“It won’t be easy to do this year because the budget for FY 2011 over-estimated revenues,” Alfred said. The tax revenues projected are about $4 million to $5 million higher than the actual revenue the Ministry of Finance is seeing this year, he said.
Budget planning for fiscal year 2012 is already in progress with the aim of developing more realistic budget projections for next year.
In addition to the zero deficit goal, Alfred said the ministry has set 2014 as the target for eliminating all audit problem areas in its annual audit of government financial management.
“We take audit findings very seriously,” he said. “We’re now using the findings as performance measures. If our questioned costs and the number of findings goes up, we’re not performing well.” The plan is to reduce the number of audit problems by about 25 percent over each of the next four years.
The number of audit finds grew from eight in 2008 to 11 in 2009. And questioned spending, after three years under $1 million annually, jumped to more than $1.3 million in 2009, the last year for which audit information is available.
