The state budget is increasingly vulnerable.

The expenditure structure has become increasingly skewed in recent years, with nearly 72% for regular expenditure, 15% for development investment expenditure and 13% for debt repayment, according to data from the General Statistics Office for the first six months of this year.

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More than ever, budgetary discipline must be tightened, otherwise, no matter how much revenue or borrowing is increased, it will not be possible to meet spending needs.

Nearly half of the time in the 90-minute press conference of the Ministry of Finance last week was spent discussing the issue of using public vehicles. However, the information given seemed unconvincing. "The data (of public vehicles) in 2014 and 2015 can be determined based on the report. But to have the exact number, we invite the press to work directly," Ms. Ta Thanh Tu, Deputy Director of the Department of State Asset Management, refused to announce the data of public vehicles nationwide to reporters right at the press conference.

It is no coincidence that reporters focused on the issue of public vehicles: that is the area where people see the most obvious signs of abuse of public assets, and want the Ministry of Finance, as the agency managing public assets, to strictly perform its inspection and supervision role.

However, public vehicles are only a very small part of public assets, which, according to the Ministry of Finance, the State has spent up to 200,000 billion VND (more than 9 billion USD) each year from the State budget to purchase and create new ones. According to the National Database on State Assets, the total value of houses, land for working offices, business establishments, means of transport, and assets worth 500 million VND or more as of the end of 2015 was about 47 billion USD, an extremely large number in an economy with a GDP of just over 200 billion USD per year. If not managed closely and transparently, this huge asset will be fertile ground for abuse and corruption. The Ministry of Finance itself admits that the use of this asset is still "dispersed, wasteful, and inefficient".

Public assets, though very important, are only part of the story of increasingly alarming budget spending. Such spending ratio shows that the State budget is increasingly vulnerable, despite the fact that each year the tax sector exceeds the revenue estimate assigned by the National Assembly by about 10%.

Currently, revenue is facing difficulties. The 2016 State budget revenue estimate decided by the National Assembly is 1,014.5 trillion VND. According to the Ministry of Finance, the State budget revenue in the first six months of the year is estimated at 476,800 billion VND, equal to 47% of the estimate, the lowest revenue compared to the same period in the last two years. In the same period in 2014, State budget revenue reached 53.9% of the estimate; in 2015, it reached 49.3% of the estimate.

Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue had to exclaim at the finance sector conference last weekend: “I suggest that provinces that are likely to not reach their revenue target this year must cut their coat according to their cloth and reduce their spending. Now, oil prices have fallen, the central budget has a deficit, and there is not much to support localities like before. The principle is to increase revenue to increase spending and spend within the allowable capacity... Otherwise, if you just spend everything, the local budget deficit increases, and then start to run to the central government, then the central government will have nothing to compensate for it.” Mr. Hue said that there are many “useless”, “showy”, “unnecessary” expenses such as receptions, celebrations, conferences, and overseas trips that must be cut.

“Overspending is a shortcoming in retrospect, but in depth it is also an achievement,” Finance Minister Dinh Tien Dung earnestly explained the increase in budget deficit to 36,000 billion VND in 2014 at the National Assembly Standing Committee in mid-June. His argument did not convince members of the National Assembly, who, based on the Constitution, wanted to tighten budget discipline that has been “not strictly” followed for a long time. As the person holding the key to the national treasury, it seems that Mr. Dung is paying more attention to budget collection, but not paying due attention to expenditures.

For example, to meet revenue needs, in the first half of this year, the financial sector issued government bonds equivalent to 83% of the annual target. Meanwhile, only 23% of this capital source was disbursed, a very small proportion. This is a very wasteful situation because on the one hand, the State still has to pay interest on undisbursed loans; on the other hand, buying too many government bonds is suffocating monetary policy, making it difficult for the banking sector to reduce interest rates.

Besides, despite reporting that state agencies had “saved” nearly 38,000 billion VND in 2015 at the above-mentioned meeting, the Minister of Finance once again failed to convince National Assembly delegates about the reality of waste from trillion-VND projects that were shelved, such as the Dinh Vu Silk Factory in Hai Phong, the Iron and Steel Factory in Thai Nguyen, the Ninh Binh Fertilizer Factory... to the misuse of public vehicles that caused public outrage.

According to TBKTSG