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Nepal may lose reimbursement
KATHMANDU, JUL 05 -
Nepal may not get reimbursement of Rs. 394.43 million combining both grants and loans as the foreign aided projects have already been closed. The country might lose Rs. 327.23 million that should have come as loans and Rs. 67.19 billion in grants until the last fiscal year, said the Financial Comptroller General's Office.
There is a tradition of spending money from the state treasury and then seeking reimbursement from donors for projects for which they have pledged support. Projects under the ministries of Finance, Local Development, Agriculture and Cooperatives, Water Resources, Physical Planning and Works, Culture and Tourism and Education and Sports could be missing loans of Rs. 327.23 million due to closure of the projects.
Likewise, projects under the Agricultural Development Bank, National Trading Limited and the Institute of Forestry besides projects including System Management and Training Programme, Environment Sanitation, Environment and Forest Entrepreneurship Programme and Higher Secondary Education Assistance Programme have already closed.
A suspension bridge related project, rural community infrastructure development programme, a project under the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction, Public Enterprise Reform Programme and a project under the Ministry of Labour and Transport may not get reimbursement of grants. "Given the closure of these projects, reimbursement may not come," said an official of the Ministry of Finance. USAID, Japan, China, UNICEF, Denmark, Swiss Development Agency, GTZ and DFID are among the donors who are yet to reimburse some amount of the grants they pledged for different projects.
Nepal should have got reimbursement of Rs. 22 billon by the end of the last fiscal year for both running projects and those that have already ended.
However, officials at the Financial Comptroller General's Office said reimbursement of Rs. 19 billion had been made until recently which may be the outstanding reimbursement of last year and this year as well. The issue was debated at the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee recently after a Public Expenditure Review Commission 2010 presented its initial report that mentioned huge amounts of foreign aid not being reimbursed.
The commission has said in its report that the ministries have little tendency of spending the budget from foreign sources and seek reimbursement quickly which has mounted pressure on the budget allocated from the country's revenue sources but that foreign aid was not being spent well. Finance Minister Surendra Pandey has also been complaining about low expenditure from the heading of foreign sources. Officials at the Finance Ministry said that the reimbursement amount remained higher due more to internal reasons than the donors.
Narayan Niraula, deputy financial comptroller general, said that some amount remains outstanding for reimbursement as more amounts are allocated in the donor heading although they promised less due to accounting mistakes on the part of Nepali government employees.
Posted on: 2010-07-06 08:16
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