First citizens’ guide to the MPALSG budget published

With the support of the EU for PAR Visibility and Communication project, the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government (MPALSG) published the first Citizens' Guide to the MPALSG budget at the beginning of June 2022.

In an effort to bring citizens and other interested members of the public closer to the planned use of available budget funds in the current year, the Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government has prepared a Citizens' Guide to the Ministry's budget for 2022. This Guide was created with the idea of presenting in a simple, easy-to-understand and dynamic way how the budget funds allocated to the Ministry in accordance with the Law on the Serbian Budget for 2022 were distributed.

In addition to a simpler presentation of the plan of spending the budget funds in the current year, the Citizen's Guide also offers an explanation of how the Ministry's budget is created, shows how much these funds were spent in previous years and how, and also contains information on donor support that the Ministry uses in implementing reform processes.

In this way, MPALSG became the first ministry which decided to bring the use of budget funds closer to the general public, in addition to the Ministry of Finance, which has been preparing and publishing the Citizen's Guide to the Budget of the Republic of Serbia for years; also, the Ministry joined a significant number of local self-governments which have had a long standing practice of developing and publishing such documents. 

The preparation of this Guide represents another in a series of small but significant steps towards creating an administration tailored to citizens, but also improving the work of the Ministry itself through the application of some of the key values of good and open government, such as fiscal transparency and accountability of public authorities.

The EU for PAR Visibility and Communication project made it possible for this important document to be designed so that the data in it is presented in a clear, simple and interesting way. The document is available at http://mduls.gov.rs/wp-content/uploads/Gradjanski-vodic-kroz-budzet-MUDLS-2022.pdf