Carry-overs or leftovers? Tackling year-end spend-downs at the central government level

ABSTRACT

Year-end spend-downs have received a lot of attention in public policy and public administration, and a number of budgeting and accounting reforms have been made to tackle this issue. While carry-overs have been thought to be a remedy, their effect remains empirically under-investigated. This paper applies a mixed-method approach to provide empirical evidence for year-end spending surges, and to analyse the effect of changing carry-over rules in Austria. The authors uncover the reasons behind spend-downs: uncertainty about carry-overs and their use, and the risk of losing unspent appropriations and efficiency savings seem to explain year-end spend-downs. The findings offer support for prior calls in the academic literature to take time and volume limitations into account when designing and implementing carry-over rules. The evidence presented here has important implications for policy-makers and managers.

IMPACT

Using the case of Austria, this paper investigates year-end spend-downs in government, and one of the most common ‘remedies’—carry-overs. Unrestricted carry-overs are likely to jeopardize aggregate fiscal targets, and highly restrictive rules about carry-over can lead to a loss of trust between central government entities and the ministry of finance. Surprisingly, carry-over rules themselves have led to year-end spend-downs. The authors explain the criteria/limitations that policy-makers, treasury officials, and financial directors and managers in central government departments and agencies need to consider when designing and implementing carry-over rules.

KEYWORDS:

• Budgeting and accounting reform
• carry-overs
• central level
• spend-downs
• wasteful year-end spending

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the guest editors for their comments and suggestions that have helped to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.