UPDATE: Gov't announces $287,472,000 budget
This was done minutes ago January 12, 2012 in the House of Assembly by Premier Dr. D. Orlando Smith, OBE, who estimated operational expenditure to be some $258, 472, 000.
The 2012 budget figure is just shy of the 2011 budget, which was presented by former Premier Hon. Ralph T. O’Neal last year and saw a $287,887,000 budget estimate, with an operational expense projection of $260,051,600.
Political pundits had indicated that the Premier would have had to be very creative in wading through the finances of the Virgin Islands “to come up with a decent budget”.
“I hope residents will not expect the moon and the stars when the estimates are read out. The country is broke,” one political analyst had told this news agency.
Hon. Smith in an address to the nation on December 6, 2011 had announced that the financial status of the Virgin Islands (VI) was far worse than anticipated.
“The situation is grim, the financial state of the Territory, to put it bluntly, is not good. Fellow citizens, it is far worse than we anticipated. The grim reality is that on assumption of office we met a running deficit of some $51M that had been incurred by the previous administration despite their full knowledge that revenue collections were down during the same period,” the Premier had stated.
According to Dr. Smith, the running deficit indicated that there are unpaid bills for capital projects to the tune of some $19.8M. Premier Smith had also revealed that cash balances as of the November 4, 2011 were slightly over $40M but when taken in the context of the running deficit of $51M, presented a picture that was “worthy of serious concern”.
The Finance Minister had further stated that the current projections by the Ministry of Finance based on the spending patterns for 2011 will be in the region of $268M, which means it is a shortfall of $18M compared to what was budgeted and approved by the HOA for the 2011 fiscal year.
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