Budgets cuts at OP...Govt not interested in resolving the problem - Dr. Roopnarine

Budgets cuts at OP…Govt not interested in resolving the problem – Dr. Roopnarine

May 26, 2014 Sports

A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) Executive Dr. Rupert Roopnarine believes that issues relating to the 2014 Budget Cuts could easily be rectified, but the government is more interested in peddling propaganda.

APNU Executive Member Dr. Rupert Roopnarine

Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr. Roger Luncheon in his recent press briefing had said the Office of the President (OP) ran out of money to pay even its most basic bills because of last month’s Opposition budget cut.
The Cabinet Secretary said the impact of the cuts has not only threatened the discharge of the constitutional functions of the President, but livelihoods of many public officers as well. Many of these officers were appointed by the Public Service Commission to pensionable posts.
The Opposition outlined that they were targeting specific agencies, like the Government Information Agency (GINA) and National Communications Network (NCN), and a number of large-scale projects including the US$150M expansion of the Timehri airport and the building of the access roads to the Amaila Falls hydro project.
According to Dr. Roopnarine, the 2014 Budget cuts were based on the Chief Justice Ian Chang’s ruling that the opposition could not cut, but can only approve or disapprove. “His ruling in essence limited the opposition actions of removing areas that they had contentions with entirely or not at all. So we ended up not approving an entire sector which included line items we had no interest in cutting.”
Because they could not cut line items as was the case with previous budgets, the opposition disapproved entirely those areas that they had contentions with and those that they said were non problematic such as the allocations for the Office of the President (OP) and the University of Guyana Student Loan subsidy among others.
“To the extent that those line items have been cut, the Minister of Finance Knows perfectly well how to access the consolidated funds” said Dr. Roopnarine.
Dr. Roopnarine asserted that government has “to come without delay to the National Assembly to get approval for the funds that they expended. Essentially they come with a statement called the statement of excess outlining in other words that they had to spend money because of X, Y and Z urgently, but they have to get the approval after the fact of the National Assembly.”
According to Dr. Roopnarine, “they can come back and receive approval for supplementary in any of the line items that fell under the Act.”
Attempts to reach Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh and Junior Minister of Finance Juan Edghill to ascertain whether they would engage the National Assembly for Supplementary for those areas which the combined opposition said they have no problems with proved futile.
The combined opposition (Alliance for Change and APNU) had expressed individually that they had no problems supporting those non problematic areas should the government return for supplementary.