Independent Authority for Financial Responsibility (AIReF) President Cristina Herrero assured on Tuesday that her body was hesitant about whether to approve the overall state budget for 2023 due to “shortcomings in the quality of information” provided by the project.

Herrero criticized the lack of information regarding the national accounting of more than 1200 million euros, while at the same time warning that “some of the income closing forecasts (for 2022) are unrealistic.”

For the head of the AIReF, the government’s decision to understate revenue in order to have a bigger margin later, as finance minister Maria Jesus Montero also explained, “is not prudence” based on the available data.

Thus, before the House Budget Committee, where he went to explain the new bills, Herrero admitted that there had been a “deep debate” within the body itself about what to do, as the law did not provide for a statement on the macroeconomic table released in July and on which the accounts are likely to be built.

Then his forecast was for growth of 2%, compared with the government’s 2.7%, and now the deteriorating economic outlook reduces it to 1.5% for the executive’s 2.1%.

In addition to saying that this macroeconomic table is approved by AIReF – “it does not mean that it approves for no reason, it must approve the table to ensure that the subsequent budget scenario is based on realistic forecasts,” he said. – Herrero asked to include income and expenditure forecasts, as well as fiscal policy measures.

They do not include measures to overcome the energy crisis.

Similarly, he criticized that the preparation of these reports, and therefore the government’s economic planning, did not include a package of measures to combat the energy and price crisis, even announcing additional measures “one week after the budget was presented”. .

In addition, Herrero omits “relevant information in terms of national accounting” because the accounts do not include it “neither in terms of adjustments nor in terms of implementation of the Recovery Plan.” “Yes, there is a performance forecast, but these are not national accounting data,” he clarified, “these are budget data translated into national accounting terminology.”

The AIReF president said the issue was “not new” and that “it hasn’t been published in years” and calculated that missing these adjustments “would be just over one percentage point of GDP”.

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