J-K govt issues policy, guidelines to enforce fiscal discipline

Jammu and Kashmir government today issued a policy and operational guidelines to enforce expenditure and fiscal discipline as part of expenditure reforms.
The policy and guidelines would also make the state legally bound to expedite resource utilisation.
The administrative secretaries have been asked to immediately put in place appropriate and robust mechanism of checks and balances in their departments, so that sustained compliance with the brushed-up public expenditure measures is not only ensured, but also facilitated, according to an order issued by the Principal Secretary Finance Navin Kumar Choudhary here.
"These measures or protocols represent the first decisive step to reform the quality and efficiency of public expenditures and have been rolled out at both the policy as well as operational levels," an official spokesman said quoting the order.

Outlining a slew of measures on the operational level to ensure fiscal discipline, the order said that following the legislative backing, these measures now have the force of law.
It said that the objective of these expenditure reforms is to enforce accepted standards of fiscal propriety, as envisaged in the J-K Finance Code.

"The passage of these measures in the state legislature, as part of the Appropriation Act, is to ensure that conformity to these measures is treated by the departments as a foregone conclusion.
"These measures, essentially, aim at drawing clear and visible redlines for the departments," the order said.

It said that there was no better way for the departments to do this than by internalising and institutionalising the virtues of restraint, discipline and propriety in their operational systems and, accordingly, re-engineer their policy and operational paradigms.
"The compliance with the fiscal protocols /measures shall be monitored by the budget division in the finance department on an ongoing basis," the order said.
It said that no payments would be made by any Treasury Officer and PAO from the next financial year under any expenditure head, if the releases for the same has not been made and further received by the spending and bill passing officers via BEAMS.

Expenditure during the last quarter, the order said, would be restricted to not more than 30 per cent of the revised estimates.
No new procurement shall be made by any department under 'Machinery and Equipment' head without building a robust inventory management system so as to have proper justification for procurement of new machinery, the order said.