The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake
Hon. Bimal Rathnayake argued that presenting a Vote on Account is permitted under Section 23(1) of the State Public Financial Management Act, No. 44 of 2024, where the Appropriation Bill for the following year has not been passed by 31 December. He stated that since the Appropriation Bill had not even been presented, there was no violation of the Act, and referred the point to the Chief Opposition Whip.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 Hon. Speaker, the State Public Financial Management Act, No. 44 of 2024, was certified on 8 August. The argument raised is that this law is being violated. I will reread what Hon. Nalinda Jayatissa said—this is a good mental exercise and a learning.
¶ 02 Under the side note “Vote on Account,” Section 23(1) states:
¶ 03 “If, by 31 December of the current year, the Appropriation Bill for the ensuing year has not been passed by Parliament…”
¶ 04 It has not been passed; it has not even been presented.
¶ 05 “…the Minister may present to Parliament a Vote on Account for specified ongoing projects and for maintaining essential public services.”
¶ 06 So what is the problem? The matter is very clear. If by 31 December the Appropriation Bill has not been passed, then a Vote on Account may be presented. We can say that the Bill has not been presented, therefore not passed. The law permits this.
¶ 07 Chief Opposition Whip, I would like to know—
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Thursday, 5 December 2024 ·No. 1734081038099638 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
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/lk/speeches/12530
Cite as: The Hon. Bimal Rathnayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 5 December 2024. No. 1734081038099638. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/12530