Following a Finance and Budget Committee meeting on Wednesday, its chairman, MP Ibrahim Kanaan, issued sharp warnings over the state’s continued failure to produce audited financial accounts, describing this as a “clear constitutional violation” of Article 87.
Kanaan stressed that Lebanese citizens are required to submit their accounts for audit and pay taxes accordingly, while the state itself has not produced audited accounts since 1993, an issue first exposed by the committee in 2010.
Furthermore, Kanaan noted that the committee unanimously issued two key observations to the government: the need to preserve the comprehensiveness of budget law to avoid legal challenges, and the necessity of keeping public accounting mechanisms separate and independent of the budget law.
He announced that the committee has completed discussions of the draft budget’s articles, suspending eight of them pending the conclusion of next week’s review of ministries’ and public administrations’ allocations.
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