In the last three months of the year, the State Treasury system has set out many important tasks to ensure the successful completion of state budget management and collection and spending.

Operations at Yen Bai State Treasury. Photo: TL 

State budget revenues and expenditures ensured amid pandemic

According to the State Treasury, in the first nine months of 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the State Treasury actively and decisively directed the whole system to fully, urgently and seriously implement Covid-19 pandemic prevention by issuing guiding documents on pandemic prevention and control.

At the same time, to ensure and maintain operations, the State Treasury directed the municipal and provincial State Treasury offices to strengthen transactions with customers through online public services and to apply information technology in information exchange; arrange staff working from home to ensure smooth operation of the whole system. In particular, the disbursement was given priority to promptly finance pandemic prevention and control in accordance with the provisions of law and directions of the Government, the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Finance and local authorities.

In the first nine months of the year, the State Treasury also maintained state budget collection and spending and services to organizations, units, businesses and people.

According to Director General of State Treasury Nguyen Duc Chi, all officials and civil servants in the system tried their best to overcome difficulties and challenges to fulfill their tasks in the past nine months.

Some important results have been achieved, namely the development and implementation of projects and policies that met the set plans; State budget revenue and expenditure management was ensured; state budget expenditures were controlled strictly according to regimes and there was timely advice to competent authorities in accelerating the disbursement of public investment capital.

In addition, the State Treasury organized the safe and effective management and administration of the state budget; raised capital in line with the disbursement schedule and debt repayment plan associated with the Government’s bond market development target.

Mr. Chi emphasized that one outstanding result of the State Treasury is the synthesis and preparation of the 2018 State Budget Final Report approved by the National Assembly with a high rate. This is the first time the National State Financial Report was synthesized and reported to the National Assembly under the prescribed deadline.

Notably, online public services have been actively deployed across the entire State Treasury system. By the end of September 30, 2020, 98% of budget-using units participated in using online public services; the number of state budget expenditure transactions through online public services reached 91.6% compared with the number of expendituredocuments via TABMIS.

Speed up the disbursement of public investment capital

In addition to the achieved results, the Director General of the State Treasury said that there are still some shortcomings and limitations and requires units to seriously solve them in the future.

Accordingly, to ensure tasks in 2020, the DirectorGeneral has directed the entire State Treasury system to focus on completing the online public service deployment as planned, ensuring that by October 31, 2020, online public services will be launched at all state budget-using units that have transactions with the State Treasury as prescribed in Decree No. 11/2020 / ND-CP of the Government (except for units in the security and defense sector).

The State Treasury must also be ready (on guiding documents, information technology system, contingency plans) to implement the closing of the accounting book at the end of 2020.

In addition, the information from now until after the XIII National Party Congress on the performance results of the State Treasury system, especially the results of the deployment of online public services should be promoted; the State Treasury should speed up disbursement of public investment capital; the State Treasury should conduct the apparatus restructuring and streamlining and conduct reform and modernization to serve customers.

For the State Treasury offices of the provinces and centrally-run cities, the Director General required these offices to focus on reporting, advising and taking advantage of the leadership of the Provincial Party Committee, People's Council, Provincial People's Committee and working with other agencies in their localities.

Besides, to promptly and accurately report on the situation and results of the disbursement of capital construction investment; to direct civil servants in charge of spending control to comply with the procedures and time for handling dossiers, especially expenditures for the Party Congress of provinces and cities and activities towards the XIII National Party Congress; not to hamper budget-using units, contributing to speeding up the disbursement of capital construction investment and recurrent spending in accordance with the Prime Minister's direction.

Notably, the provincial state treasuries also have to work closely with relevant agencies to urgently prepare and review information and data on the provincial State Financial Report in 2019 and submit it to the Provincial People's Committee to report to the year-end meeting of the Provincial People's Council.

Mr. Nguyen Duc Chi suggested the units strengthen inspection of operations and internal management of professional divisions at the State Treasury offices at province and district levels; prepare necessary conditions to implement the project of rearranging and merging a number of district State Treasuries, reorganizing the district State Treasury officers into the regional State Treasury according to the plan of the Ministry and the direction of the State Treasury.