IDDEEA: Our Budget Has Been Reduced, Personal Documents, Passports, License Plates at Risk

(Patria) - The Agency for Identification Documents, Registers and Data Exchange of Bosnia and Herzegovina (IDDEEA), as a budget beneficiary, duly and timely submitted to the Ministry of Finance and Treasury of Bosnia and
Herzegovina its budget proposal, based on actual expenditure, valid contracts and obligations
towards citizens and institutions.

Through the further process of drafting and adopting the budget, which involves several institutions at the state level, changes and reductions of certain budget items occurred. IDDEEA has no insight into at which stage and by which institution these changes were made.

Therefore, at the time of the final adoption of the budget, IDDEEA was already placed in a financial deficit. The Agency does not adopt the budget and cannot change decisions imposed on it, nor does it influence the decisions of bodies responsible for the budget process.

In order to ensure minimum conditions for functioning, IDDEEA has already submitted a request for restructuring its own budget, as well as a request for the allocation of additional funds from the budget reserve of Bosnia and Herzegovina. With this, the Agency has exhausted all possibilities provided by law. Further decisions are under the exclusive competence of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

As a consequence of the imposed budget framework, we will reach a situation where it will not be possible to timely settle obligations towards suppliers, even though IDDEEA has fully fulfilled all its obligations. If someone believes that the state no longer needs personal documents, passports, license plates, driver's licenses or the maintenance of information networks, then that is a decision of the institutions that create and adopt the budget, not the Agency.

Therefore, this problem is not IDDEEA's problem, but a problem of budget planning at the state level. The consequences of such decisions directly affect the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina and all institutions to which IDDEEA provides services. At the same time, we want to clearly state that IDDEEA will not undertake anything that is beyond its legal authority.

We will act exclusively in accordance with the law and the instructions of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is responsible for creating the financial and operational framework within which the Agency operates.

IDDEEA will continue to professionally perform all tasks within its competence, but citizens and institutions must know that the Agency bears the consequences of the budget allocated to it, not the one it requested and clearly justified.

We emphasize once again that IDDEEA has done its legal job: we submitted the budget proposal to the Ministry of Finance of Bosnia and Herzegovina in accordance with all procedures. Who, in the further decision-making chain – the Ministry of Finance of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the House of Representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina or the House of Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, changed these items, we do not know, it was stated by IDDEEA.