Treasury overshoots budget by Sh120.8bn

The State has overshot its approved 2020/2021 budget by Sh120.8 billion, mainly pressed by Covid-19 related expenditure, new documents filed in Parliament show.

Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani said the overall ministerial cumulative expenditure in the fiscal year 2020/21 had increased by four per cent from the original approved budget of which recurrent and development spending climbed by 2.1 and 7.7 per cent, respectively.

“The implementation of the financial year 2020/21 budget continues to face various challenges. These include the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic which slowed down economic performance, underperformance of projected revenues in the first half of the financial year” he said.

“Further, an increased demand for additional priority expenditures poses a challenge to the implementation of ongoing projects”

Supplementary budget estimates tabled in Parliament yesterday show the Treasury spent Sh45.6 billion to repay debt, pension and foot salaries for constitutional office holders.

“The overall change in the National Government Ministerial Budget (excluding Consolidated Fund Services and County allocations) from the original approved budget is an increase of Sh75.1 billion which reflect a 4 per cent change,”Mr Yatani said.

The Treasury said some of the adjustments made however exceeded the 10 per cent threshold required by the law.

“We are in this regard requesting for special approval of the expenditure adjustments which are beyond the 10 per cent threshold in accordance with regulation 40(9) of the Public Finance Management Regulations, 2015,” Mr Yatani said.

The Treasury said revenue performance was below target by Sh107.6 billion for the period July 2020 to December 2020. The taxman collected Sh800.1 billion against a target of Sh907.7 billion in the period.