ABSTRACT
The technical intricacies of budgeting almost never receive the attention of the mass media even when public attention is focused upon national, state, or local presentations of the executive budget to the respective legislatures. Usually, public interest is directed toward several controversial items and those projects which represent radical or significant departures from typical government policy. The media and public may be concerned with why more funding is recommended for some programs and others are curtailed, but they seldom inquire as to how such decisions are made and the kinds of information on which budget formulations and governmental decisions are based. Consequently, there appear to be few public matters that are more untranslatable for the ordinary citizen than the methods used for determining program expenditures. Nevertheless, the policies and programs of every agency are very much an outcome of the procedures utilized for collecting and analyzing the spending requests made by managers and their subordinates at every level. The fact that a great deal of the budget-making process is conducted in a
give-and-take atmosphere of trade-offs and desired policy implementation as opposed to or in accord with political decisions cannot diminish the importance of the process.1 The business of budgeting is inextricably tied to complex accounting and administrative techniques which are vital for professionals to understand. As the public sector has developed in size and scope, the public has also
grown increasingly concerned about the sufficiency, effectiveness, and efficiency of the methods employed for determining public expenditures.2 In the past 50 years, broadly based attempts have been made to improve the budgetary process used within the public sector. In the 1950s the concept of performance budgeting was put forward. During the 1960s the concept of Planning Programming Budgeting System (PPBS) was developed. The objective of performance budgeting was to inform budget makers more completely concerning the work and services of a given agency. PPBS has a considerably broader purpose – the utilization of the budget process for analyzing the goals and predictable results of public programs, and
the objectives Performance budgeting measures whether or not management is deliver-
ing expected financial performances; it also measures whether income from all sources and expenditures incurred are in accordance with intentions informing budget development; it also assesses whether management is really delivering expected administrative performance.3
