REPORT: Workshop on The Role of Parliament in the Budget Process

The core activity of INTER PARES involves building peer-to-peer partnerships between Parliaments indeveloping democracies and European Union Member State Parliaments (EUMSPs), leveraging the expertise and experience of EUMPs to support the Parliaments’ development priorities. In 2023, the Parliament of Ukraine was selected as a new INTER PARES partner Parliament. A scoping mission was carried out in May 2023, in which a ‘partnership fiche’ was developed detailing the VRU’s partnership priorities. Within the 7 priorities, “Strengthening Parliament’s role in the national budget cycle” was identified as important and urgent.

In the 2019 Public Expenditure Framework Assessment (PEFA) carried out by the Government of Ukraine with the World Bank and through EU financing, Parliament’s role in the ex-ante scrutiny of the budget (PI-18) was relatively poor (D+ on a scale of A-D). Parliament’s role in external ex-post scrutiny of budget audits was relatively strong (B), however this does not take into account the quality of the audit reports, which are generally not considered to be following international standards. The fact that the VRU has not demanded higher quality audit reports has been identified as a weakness in Parliaments’ budgetary role.