Enabling the Capacity of the House of Representatives in Coping with the Budgetary Process

This study is aimed at investigating roles and competencies of the House of Representatives in coping with the public budgetary process, as well as to provide recommendations for the House of Representatives in improving its respective roles. The research applies the institutional approach, in which legal and official documents as well as previous studies on the legislative budget process have been explored first, and followed by interviews, group discussion, and workshop with key actors. The field research had been executed during June and November 2021. The research findings reveal that the budgetary appropriation process of the House of Representatives has been gradually improved since 2008, and has accelerated after 2017. It is remarked that previous drawbacks have been partly resolved, while others still exist. Among those is the passive role of the legislative oversight on the budget  implementation process. At the meantime, the House of Representatives faces with new challenges of the abrupt increase in the number of new budget units and highly fragmented budget programs due to the implementation of the new Budget Act of 2018. The budget committee, accordingly, has been overreacted by tones of budget documents that nearly reach its maximum capacity. Two principal recommendations have been proposed. First, the House of Representatives should extend and strengthen the role of the Parliament to cover the whole budget processes. Second, it is recommended that the House of Representatives adopt a proactive and qualitative approach on the budget reviews and oversight in order to improve the quality of public budgeting and, at the same time, to moderate the overburden of the budget-making committee in the long-run.