Govt seeks approval for fresh supplementary estimates

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa today asked Parliament to approve two new supplementary estimates; one to increase the Government's recurrent and capital expenditures and another to account for expenses from projects utilizing foreign loans.

Making a special statement outlining the current economic situation, Mr Rajapaksa requested Parliament to approve a supplementary estimate that would raise the recurrent expenditure allocated to Government Ministries by Rs 101 billion and capital expenditure by Rs 55 billion.

In addition, he asked the House to approve another supplementary estimate to the tune of Rs 211 billion to account for expenses from projects utilizing foreign loans.

Mr Rajapaksa also asked Parliament to approve a concurrent amendment to raise the debt ceiling from Rs 721 billion to Rs 1078 billion.

Since the previous Government had already spent much of the budgetary allocations due for 2019, the Treasury could not release most of the funds needed for November and December of last year, he stressed.

He told Parliament that as at November, 2019, the Government had only received Rs 1600 billion out of an approved sum of Rs 2400 billion for Government revenue. This had not exceeded Rs 1800 billion by December. “Accordingly, there is a shortfall of Rs 600 billion from the Government’s expected revenue,” he pointed out.

“All this clearly shows that though a complicated tax regime which imposed high taxes across the board for all sectors was put in place, it did not bring in the expected revenue for the Government,” the PM further noted.