Deadly Sins in Public Budgeting of Iran

Abstract

Budgeting is a pervasive activity in the governmental system across the world; in a way that “The Budget” as a product of allocation process goes beyond the political rhetoric, representing the real priorities and preferences of each government in the social realm. However, budgeting as a part of political system has a set of recurring issues and problems that reduce the effectiveness of budgeting system in achieving the considered goals; in this study we called those problems, “deadly sins”. To identify these deadly sins in budgeting, the qualitative method of theme analysis has been used and data collection was done through interviews. According to the finding of the study, ten deadly sins in Iran budgeting process are: “Disconnection of budget relations with upstream documents”, “Distortion strategies of the facts”, “Rule of organizational life”, “Lack of theoretical basis”, “Extreme idealism and lack of pragmatism”, “Abundance of budgetary and non-budgetary orders”, “Multiplicity of sundry rows”, “violation of budget principals”, “lack of process transparency” and “lack of accountability”. Obviously, by improving each of these factors, the budget can be set in the right direction and the national goals and objectives mentioned in the upstream documents, in particular the vision document and development plans, can be achieved easier.

Keywords

• Budget document
• Deadly sins
• Public budgeting
• Real priorities