A key meeting between the government and opposition on the budget is yet to take place because of scheduling differences Minister of Finance Dr Ashni Singh said, and he brushed off criticism that the meeting at this juncture may mean little for the process.
Speaking to Stabroek News yesterday, Minister Singh said he has made available all of the information the opposition parties had requested. He said that conflicts in scheduling have caused one meeting to be delayed and the opposition is to furnish a date that is suitable for to meet him.
“The talks are continuing with the parliamentary parties,” he said. “We supplied the information requested [by the opposition]. I did invite them to a meeting. We shared with them substantial information and have invited them to a follow-up meeting,” the minister said.
He said Carl Greenidge of APNU wrote him a letter stating that the date set for the meeting was not suitable and offered to propose a suitable date. The minister is yet to finalise this.
The budget is due for presentation by the end of March every year, according to the constitution. “They are to get back to us, but we continue to receive feedback from other stakeholders. We have invited organised labour and we will meet again in the coming weeks,” said the minister.
Asked how budget preparations were coming, the minister responded that his ministry is working on the budget. He said even though government and opposition or other stakeholders may not agree on everything, this does not take away from the importance of the feedback afforded through such meetings. He said even though it is weeks before the presentation of the budget, any input is valuable and will be listened to. He said planning for the budget is an ongoing process.
Greenidge was unavailable for comment yesterday.
Speaking on behalf of the Alliance for Change (AFC) Leader Khemraj Ramjattan said the party has received responses from the minister of finance saying that many of the proposals the party submitted have been implemented already in one way or another. “When we ask for certain intangibles, they saying [they] did them already,” he said; “he gave us a lengthy document [detailing] the items that we have asked for which have been met.”
“We will be issuing a press release on it,” Ramjattan went on to say, identifying the installation of the Public Procurement Commission (PPC) and a reduction in the Value Added Tax (VAT) as two of the changes the party had asked for.
According to Ramjattan, the minister said that while it is the government’s intention to move forward on the PPC, it would not be budging on the VAT, since this tax is part of a larger strategy.
Giving a prelude to the budget during a press conference on February 9, Singh had said that there will be no dramatic fiscal deviation in 2013. Sounding a warning to the opposition, he said that every item of expenditure will have to be accompanied by an equal source of financing that expenditure.
Singh had said that budget 2013 would see government continuing to emphasise macro-economic sustainability. He said that it would have a focus on inflation containment, investment in physical infrastructure, social services and diversifying and modernising the economy. The minister had said too that the budget would also contain details addressing the transformation of the struggling sugar sector and that emphasis would also be placed on the One Laptop per Family and the Grow More Food projects, among others.
