June 4, 2003	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 3, 1424

PESHAWAR, June 3: The Medium Term Budgetary Framework (MTBF), a provincial government document setting budgetary targets for a period of four financial years starting from the 2002-03 fiscal year, would be revised, according to official sources.

The move has been necessitated after the provincial government failed to meet most of the targets envisaged for the first year of its implementation.

“The MTBF is being revised for the next financial year to set realistic targets for the next financial year,” said the official sources.

The last military-backed civilian government in the province had prepared the MTBF for obtaining loan from the World Bank under its Structural Adjustment Credit (SAC) facility.

The new provincial government failed to meet majority of the targets the last government had set for the 2002-03 financial year under the MTBF, to improve the over all provincial resource base.

“Though there are certain areas in which significant progress has been made, majority of the targets remained a far cry,” said the sources.

The revised MTBF would underline the current revenue and current expenditure budgetary plan of the province for the up- coming new financial year that would be submitted to the World Bank to qualify for the second tranche of SAC—a three-year lending programme involving three annual instalments of $90m.

The MTBF’s targets seeking improvement in almost all the heads of provincial own receipts during the 2002-03 financial year remained unfulfilled with the provincial tax collection machinery miserably failed to improve recoveries under most of the heads.

The sources in the finance ministry said that the new MTBF would be drawn by adopting a rational approach, projecting the next financial year’s targets of current revenue and current expenditure at a realistic level.

They attributed the failure to meet most of the targets of MTBF for the 2002-03 financial year to the district governments’ incapacity to maintain their accounts properly and effectively to pursue the achievement of the goals they were supposed to meet in the out-going fiscal year.

Inadequacies at the level of the provincial finance department and the over all tax collection apparatus of the provincial government have also been held responsible for the failure.

The sources in the federal government said that the province was required to improve its efficiency level, particularly, capacity of the finance department to properly monitor the revenue collection and development expenditure to overcome the problems the province faced during the 2002-03 financial year.

“They have to go long way to improve resource base of the province,” said a senior government functionary based at Islamabad.