Budget Transparency

In an ideal world the budget process of any country should be transparent, there should accountability and also some degree of citizen participation in the budget process. This is important for a number of reasons, which includes that when there is budget transparency this gives the oversight institutions such as the auditors the right information in order to strengthen their role and power to do check and balances. With wrong or limited information it leads to these oversight institutions not giving out the right kind of information as their assessment which will not be a true reflection of the situation.
The purpose of this paper is to advocate for more budget transparency, accountability and participation in Botswana’s budget process. When

These entities have a duty to the people to act visibly, predictably and understandably. There are two ways for transparency to be useful, giving out raw data that does not communicate anything to the people is not total transparency. The first criteria for total transparency is relevance and accessibility: this information must be available to all individuals at low or no costs and it should be in languages that the people can understand. The second criteria is that this information should be timely and accurate : information should be made available to all analysts and the public in time to allow evaluation and most importantly this information should be accurate. Governments should not provide information after the policies have been drawn and implemented, this will make the information outdated and

It is based on the idea that governments, agencies and societies should act according to certain standards. Accountability is a relationship between actors, one group is held accountable by another group, like how the 3 arms of government are accountable to each other.
There are 4 sequential stages of accountability which are: Standard setting: setting out behavior expected of the accountee and the criteria in which their validity will be assessed. Investigation: exploring whether or not accountees have met the standards expected of them. Answerability : a process in which the accountees are required to defend their actions, respond to questions and generally explain themselves. This applies to both negative as well as to positive feedback. Sanction: a process in which accountees are n some way punished for falling below the standards expected of them or rewarded for exceeding them (Moore and Teskey,