Funding Public Health Action Programs: Allocations, Budget Execution and Post-Audit Results at the Level of the First Pandemic Year

Abstract

The 2020 budget year was strongly marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, which brought out the worst in the entire world’s economy - a major recession which has profoundly impacted the health and social protection systems, societies as a whole, etc. In this context, we draw upon the analysis of the funding of the Romanian action programs in this field, in terms of allocations, budget execution and post-audit results at the level of the first pandemic year. Our analysis, as expected, reveals some relatively unfavorable aspects. Obviously, the situation has been consistant with what has happened in all the European Union’s Member States. However, even if the economic and budgetary context of the financial allocations needed for carrying out public health action programs has been marked by the Excessive Deficit Procedure action, launched by the European Commission, it has not entirely justified the fact that the audit on the use of public financial resources allocated for the year 2020 found non-compliance of such magnitude as those we dwell on in our paper.

Keywords

• public health
• budget allocations
• compliance of ministry of health’s expenditure
• public audit
• financial statements