Basic Report

The purpose of this study is to suggest policy directions and alternatives on fiscaltransparency in local government operation. Fiscal transparency is a critical element ofeffective fiscal management, defined as openness toward the public at large about all relevantfiscal information on government activities in a reliable, timely and systematic manner.Recently local governments have made efforts to improve fiscal transparency through fiscaldisclosure system, citizen participatory budgeting, scrutiny of local council and resident, andvarious financial means such as midterm fiscal plan, investment examination system, issueof local debt, etc, but is still lack in scope and specific disclosure of information, accessand availability of information, independent assurance of integrity and so forth.The composition of this study is as follows: the chapter 2 overviews the theoreticalbackground such as concept, virtues, key aspects of fiscal transparency and the chapter 3examines the reality and the problems of the current fiscal disclosure system and conductstransparency survey focused on civil servant and expert group. In response to the policydirection drawn for enforcing local fiscal transparency, the study in chapter 4 suggests somepolicy measures as follows:(1) The scope and quality of information disclosure should be assured in order tounderstand sufficiently the contents of financial activities, to promote and facilitate greatertransparency.(2) The public participation and internal-external control system should be revitalizedincluding internal financial management system, citizen participatory budgeting, surveillanceof local council, residents monitoring and independent auditing.(3) The availability and access to information should be strengthened in terms of sharingand utilization of fiscal information.(4) Local government transparency survey need to be conducted in order to measure thestate and level of fiscal(budget) transparency including the development of open budget index.