To step up financial operation counseling for local governments and help them develop financial sources and improve financial performance, the Ministry of Finance held a “Local Government Financial Operation Coordination Meeting” on Jan. 18, with the financial executives of most municipality and county (city) governments or their designated agents attending the meeting.
In order to help local governments to actively increase financial resources, expand new ideas on finance and build breakthrough methods, in this report meeting, the representatives of local governments who performed well in “open-source performance”, “tax arrears collection of local government” and “debt management” under the 2020 Local Government Financial Operation Counseling Project were specially arranged to share their experience. Firstly, Taoyuan City Government, with income increase performance of financial management as the topic, introduced various actively promoted income increase measures, including tax base and source widening, tax arrears collection, urban land consolidation, zonal expropriation, promotion of regular review and proper adjustment of fees, public housing and land inventory and disposal, and reinforcement of public property management, to effectively use resources and increase incomes to the municipal treasury. In addition, in terms of expenditure reduction, the government reduced expenditure through private participation in investment, and effectively save costs by the measures such as fund procurement of the municipal treasury and concentrated payment.
In terms of tax arrears collection of local government, the Local Tax Bureau of Taichung City Government shared the use of the PDCA model [Plan, Do, Check and Action] to prevent new tax arrears and settle old tax arrears, including formulating various programs. To prevent new tax arrears, the measures taken were strengthening the initiative of tax collection, improving delivery ratio, carrying out tax preservation and amending laws according to the economic weakness. In terms of old tax arrears collection, the Bureau effectively settled old tax arrears by improving the efficiency of transfer and execution, investigating the property available for execution, settling vouchers, settling, reviewing and controlling the cases beyond the time limit of approval, collection and execution, and executing the real-time seizure and auction jointly with branch offices. The achievement was very good.
Furthermore, Chiayi City Government shared its experience in debt management. The government has made achievements in debt management in recent years. In order to realize the goal of debt reduction of financial efficiency improvement and debt increase control, the debt management efficiency was realized by the measures of income increase and expenditure reduction, such as strict controlling borrowing limit, strengthening financial scheduling of the municipal treasury, using surplus funds in the municipal treasury to control borrowing and save interests, actively attracting investments to increase tax sources and introducing civil resources to promote public construction.
Deputy Administrative Minister Juan attended the meeting. In addition to handing out awards to representatives of local governments evaluated as having outstanding performance under the 2020 Local Government Financial Operation Counseling Project, he explained to everyone again that the Fiscal Discipline Law had already taken effect on Apr. 10, 2019 and he hoped local governments could cooperate with the central government to assure the law was properly enforced to prevent loss of financial sources and the incremental unnecessary spending to reach the mid- and long-term budget balance goals. In the meantime, Deputy Minister Juan also encouraged the staff members of financial departments in local governments to adopt new thinking to cope with existing problems and help their units find appropriate financial sources in order to improve financial performance to speed up various public works projects and pursue sustainable financial development in spite of limited financial resources.
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