US report makes 8 key suggestions for BD’s financial transparency

The United States (US) has issued eight key recommendations to improve transparency in Bangladesh's financial sector, according to its 2025 Fiscal Transparency Report released by the US State Department on Friday.
The recommendations include publishing end-of-year reports in a timely manner, preparing budgets in line with international standards, providing detailed breakdowns of expenditures and revenues, ensuring an independent and well-resourced audit institution with full access to the annual budget, releasing timely audit reports with substantive findings, and disclosing information on natural resource extraction and public procurement contracts.
According to the report, Bangladesh's non-political interim government has followed the budget recommendations and implementation procedures of the former government while initiating significant reforms to improve fiscal transparency.
"The prior government made its executive budget proposal and enacted budget publicly available, including online. It did not make its end-of-year report publicly available within a reasonable period," the report noted.
Budget information was generally considered reliable, but the documents were not prepared in line with internationally accepted principles, it said, adding that information on debt obligations was publicly available.
"Budget documents provided a reasonably complete picture of the government's planned expenditures and revenues, including natural resource revenues," the report reads.
However, it observed that the government did not provide a breakdown of expenditures to support executive offices, nor did the budget present a substantially complete picture of revenues and expenditures.
Publicly available budget documents included allocations to and earnings from state-owned enterprises. But due to the change in government, the supreme audit institution did not review accounts, though it released some summarised findings within a reasonable period.
The report stressed that the audit institution still falls short of international standards of independence.
The State Department also said the government specified in law or regulation, and appeared to follow in practice, the criteria and procedures for awarding natural resource extraction contracts and licences.
It noted that only limited information was disclosed on public procurement contracts.
"The interim government has moved to ensure full transparency in all procurements for natural resource extraction, suspending all previous and ongoing direct negotiations initiated by the former government," the report stated. Fiscal transparency, the report emphasised, allows citizens to see how government and tax revenues are spent, supporting accountability, market confidence, and economic growth. In this year's assessment, 71 of 140 governments and entities met the minimum fiscal transparency requirements. Sixty-nine - including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Maldives - did not meet the minimum standards, though 26 of them made significant progress toward compliance.

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