Republic of Lebanon : Country Financial Accountability Assessment

Abstract

This CFAA aims to propose pragmatic and feasible solutions to problem areas in the current environment. The recommendations are presented in Appendix 8 to this report, and the key recommendations that are designed to address the areas of greatest fiduciary risk for the Government are summarized in this Executive Summary. These key recommendations are designed to assist the Government in improving the Lebanese public financial management system and provide the foundation to all the donors to move towards greater use of the country system. One of the CFAA's overall themes is that the Government must continue to work to develop a unified budget framework that enables proper management of the finances of the Government, in collaboration with the Bank and the IMF. This would assist the Government to better control public sector debt, revenues and expenditures, maintain its social safety nets, and improve its financial relations with the public utilities. The current budget framework is not unified for the entire public sector; many of its financial activities are still not transparent to the Government itself, to Parliament or to the public. These include transactions of extra-budgetary funds and entities, loans to selected public autonomous agencies that are converted to expenditure at the end of the financial year and unutilized investment authority that is carried forward without additional parliamentary disclosure or for review of actual performance against the budget plans. There is also no formal audit opinion by the Court of Accounts on the fairness of the Government's annual financial report. The CFAA report makes a number of recommendations to address these practices.