An amendment to the Act on the General Government Budgetary Rules introduced the public expenditure ceilings as a key budgetary tool to achieve long-term sustainability of public finances with effect from 1st April 2022.
The Act defines the tasks for the Council for Budget Responsibility (CBR) involving the calculation, updates to, and evaluation of the compliance with the public expenditure ceilings. For this purpose, the CBR has an obligation to prepare the methodology, upon agreement with the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic (Ministry of Finance), and publish it. When calculating and/or updating the public expenditure ceilings, the CBR follows the methodology in effect as of 1st January of the year in which the public expenditure ceilings are calculated and/or updated.
The goal of this document is to describe in detail the methodology regarding the expenditure ceilings and its structure corresponds to individual areas for which the CBR is responsible. Chapter 2 contains the definition of public expenditure ceilings, including reasons for exclusion of some expenditure groups. Chapter 3 describes individual steps necessary to calculate the public expenditure ceilings, including the sources of input data, as well as the exact identification of individual items. Chapter 4 contains the procedure to update the public expenditure ceilings, with the law distinguishing between a regular ceiling update and updates in extraordinary situations. Chapter 5 contains the procedure to evaluate compliance with public expenditure ceilings, including a detailed description of the factors to be considered in the assessment. Chapter 6 describes the procedures for the publication of all data used by the CBR to calculate, update, and evaluate the compliance with public expenditure ceilings in order to ensure the highest level of transparency in the area of expenditure ceilings. The last chapter, chapter 7, describes the procedure applied to the first calculation of the public expenditure ceilings in those areas where the calculation by the CBR differs from the standard procedure described in the previous chapters.
This methodology can be amended at any time upon the CBR’s and/or the Ministry of Finance’s proposal, following their mutual agreement.
