The amendments were published on the parliament’s website on Saturday.
The amendment to the General Government Act would give the government the power — temporarily, for this year — to rechannel funds within budget chapters in order to meet unforeseen extra expenses during the year. Another proposed amendment would authorize the government to withdraw or use residuals from earlier years.
The amendments to the 2011 Budget Act propose setting aside reserves — through the freezing of some targeted spending — in budget chapters or institutions, such as the Parliament, the President’s Office, the Constitutional Court and other courts, the chief attorney’s office, at which the government may not take such steps without parliamentary approval. Within Parliament’s budget chapter, the amendment would channel HUF 5 billion of the funding of public media services to reserves which could be released by a parliamentary decision up to November 20.
The amendments also raise the payments some state institutions are to make from their own revenue to the budget. Most of these measures were already part of a government decree published a week earlier in the official gazette Magyar Kozlony establishing a reserve with HUF 237 billion in frozen funds, savings and payments.
Among the items that are new or different from those outlined in the decree is an increase in the amount financial market regulator PSZAF must pay to the budget from an original target of HUF 4.1 billion to HUF 4.732 billion and a rise in the payments the Hungarian Energy Office must make from HUF 228 million in the decree to HUF 728 million.
The measures will raise 2011 central budget revenue by a slight HUF 1.7 billion to HUF 13,153 billion, thus cutting the budget deficit by a similar figure.
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