State Comptroller: Treasury Floods Budget Panel With Late-Year Transfers, Weakening Oversight

State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman has urged the Finance Ministry to review the way budget changes are handled, reduce both their number and size, and submit them earlier whenever possible. He said this would improve Knesset oversight and help government ministries manage and execute the state budget more properly.

Englman examined a decades-old practice in which the Finance Ministry sends hundreds of requests for budget changes to the Knesset Finance Committee in the final month of the budget year, and sometimes in the closing days of the year. Because committee members are already overloaded with annual budget debates, they often cannot fully study the transfers and are pressured to approve them quickly. In some cases, lawmakers condition their support on sector-specific allocations, including for yeshivas and settlements.

The report says the pattern repeated at the end of 2024, the second budget year of the war in Gaza, when large sums were moved toward the defense budget through an additional budget law. The comptroller wrote that 2024 saw an unprecedented volume of supplementary budget laws and requests before the Finance Committee in December. He said some requests were forwarded by the finance minister as notifications and discussed under an existing practice even when committee approval was not needed, increasing the workload. According to the report, 335 budget approval requests were submitted and approved in December 2024, 304 of them that same month, worth 2.7 billion shekels.

The comptroller warned that some requests were approved while others were left unapproved, harming ministries’ ability to operate continuously and efficiently and leading some ministries to spend money without approved budgets, in violation of the law. He said the findings raise concern about bypassing the Budget Foundations Law, weakening decision-making, oversight, and proper management of public funds. At the end of 2024, about 4.6 billion shekels in requests remained pending before the committee. Englman said the timing can delay government activity into the next year and that spending before committee approval may be unlawful. He called on the Finance Ministry and ministry comptrollers to obey the law and speed up submission of budget requests, including those based on government decisions.