FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
At the end of July, the budget balance was closed with a surplus of ALL 45.2 billion. This means that the government has collected 425 million euros more from taxes and other financial resources than it has spent on salaries, pensions or other public expenditure items. This money lies dormant in government accounts.
For the same period, i.e. in the first 7 months of the year, the arrears of the central government to the business increased by 5 billion ALL or 47 million euros. These are invoices for work, which businesses have carried out in the field and which the government has recognized according to the relevant situations.
More precisely, from 6.7 billion ALL at the end of last year, in July the government's unpaid obligations to business for public works reached 11.7 billion ALL.
This is the financial backbone of public finance administration. On the one hand, the state budget is bursting with surplus, on the other hand, the government does not pay the business for the well-known and accepted situations of public works.
Corruption and mismanagement
The concern about the increase in the arrears of the Albanian government has also been forcefully raised by the European Commission. The Commission's experts fail to understand how the government can increase arrears by putting business under tension, when the budget has a surplus of 425 million euros.
But these are the numbers. And this phenomenon has two reasons why it happens. The first is that actual work on certain public works projects advances beyond the current year's budget planning.
The point is, if for a road the budget has planned 100 million ALL for this year, but the company that builds it has performed 150 million ALL of works according to the situation, then 50 million ALL is created in arrears. This obligation can only be hidden through reallocations by changing the budget, which is often done by normative act.
The second reason is even more malignant. The business is held hostage to legitimate payments due until it knocks on the right office. This is corruption. There is no money, but you did not meet the official to sign for their passage. And this usually happens in state offices.
Even some time ago, factoring companies became fashionable in Albania. Businesses that could not get the money they were due from the budget were forced to sell their invoices at a discount to factoring companies. And often the factoring companies were owned by the officials who had to sign the transfer of payments from the budget. A big circus of corruption, which is never broken./Oligarchy
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