Ahn Il-hwan, Deputy Minister of Finance, to Restructure Project Expenditure to Address "Poor Performance, Execution Delays, Overlaps, and Inefficiencies"

At the Expert Meeting on Strengthening the Financial Project Evaluation System

Ahn Il-hwan, Vice Minister of Strategy and Finance, is delivering opening remarks while presiding over the "Expert Meeting for Systematizing Fiscal Project Evaluation" held on the 13th at the Government Seoul Office in Gwanghwamun, Seoul.

[Sejong=Asia Economy Reporter Joo Sang-don] Ahn Il-hwan, Vice Minister of Strategy and Finance, stated on the 13th, "It is necessary to more effectively promote expenditure restructuring and project improvement through strict evaluation of underperformance, delayed execution, duplication, and inefficient projects."

Vice Minister Ahn made these remarks while presiding over the 'Expert Meeting on Fiscal Project Evaluation' at the Government Seoul Office on the same day.

At the meeting, he said, "While responding to increased spending due to quarantine measures and overcoming the COVID-19 crisis, efficient fiscal management is more important than ever to maintain fiscal sustainability," adding, "Fiscal project evaluation is a key tool to induce efficient fiscal management."

He further explained, "Last year, through 11 types of evaluations conducted by fiscal authorities and ministries, including in-depth evaluations, subsidy project evaluations, and job evaluations, over 2,700 projects were assessed, resulting in 180 expenditure restructuring proposals (6.6% of evaluation targets) and 397 system improvement proposals (14.5%), which were fed back into the budget."

Vice Minister Ahn emphasized the need to strengthen the linkage between evaluation results and budget feedback to maximize the efficiency of fiscal expenditure and stressed the necessity to review ways to systematize the functions among evaluation systems.

He said, "The newly established evaluation systems should reduce the burden on those evaluated by strengthening connections between evaluations through the use of common evaluation indicators and common evaluation guidelines," and added, "It is necessary to scientifically manage the history of budget performance information and evaluation information by utilizing systems such as D-Brain, which will be launched next January as the next-generation platform."

He also urged careful consideration for substantive evaluations. Vice Minister Ahn stated, "Subsidy evaluations should discuss alternatives to meticulously review whether there are unnecessary or habitual subsidies through on-site inspections of beneficiary delivery systems," and "Autonomous evaluations conducted by ministries need to be improved so that they are not lenient assessments but opportunities to determine budget priorities according to each ministry's policy direction."

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