Reference no: EM133596726

Question 1: Executive agencies demonstrate great care in crafting data-informed budgets that balance past performance, existing conditions, and future predictions (well, hopefully). Legislatures may enter the process and eventually approve budgets that look potentially different from those proposed by the executive. This challenges us to think about this tension and underlying democratic principles of representativeness. If you're a legislator considering the merits of a budget, which do you give more weight to: the carefully crafted budget informed by data, or the express wishes of your constituents?

Preauditor Controls

Technically, what the central budget office does is a form of preaudit­-that is, checking over transactions before they're consummated. If you're in a big agency, you may have three or more layers of preaudit-your department will have one, the central budget office will have one, and there will be a separate office, usually called something like the comptroller or the treasurer or even the auditor, who will check it all once again. It is not actually necessary that you be grateful for all this attention, and it will slow down your transactions.

The main purposes of preaudit are to ensure the legality and propriety of expenditures, and the adequacy of available fund balances, with the added notes above that the central budget office has broader interests than that. When people complain about "red tape," they are often complaining about the multiplication of preaudit controls. On the other hand, the first time an irregular transaction is allowed to occur, people start demanding more controls again.

Question 2: Budget execution may require a number of procedural steps like those noted in the discussion of "preaudits." Some of these may feel like significant red tape, but others may be necessary. How do we balance the importance of those activities against the burdens they place on bureaucrats attempting to do the work of their agency?