The package of budget-related draft laws, adopted by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on 22 November 2018, has approved amendments to the Budget Code of Ukraine. The experts of the Financial Monitoring Group of the Central Reform Office under MinRegion explained in detail what kind of innovations will come into effect from 2019.

Consequently, the Law amended the Budget Code of Ukraine regarding:

• granting the right to the oblast councils to exercise external borrowings and provide local guarantees (amendments to Articles 2, 16, 17, 18, 60, 61, 74 of the Code);
• regulation of certain provisions of the Budget Code on the formation of local budgets in terms of application of the programme-targeted method at the level of local budgets (amendments to Articles 10, 28 of the Code);
• synchronisation of the provisions of Law No. 2497 dated 10 July 2018 and the Budget Code concerning the payment of personal income tax on land plots’ (shares’) rent, to local budgets at the location of land plots (amendments to Article 64 of the Code);
• supplementing the list of protected budget expenditures with the expenditures for the programme of state guarantees of medical care of the population in order to avoid possible situations with a decrease in its funding, when reducing budget expenditures (amendments to Article 55 of the Code);
• introduction of a new subvention for the provision of state support to people with special educational needs (Code is supplemented with Article 103³).

The experts point out that local self-government bodies need to quickly process all the changes concerning the formation and implementation of local budgets in order to properly organise the budget process on their territories.

Materials are prepared by the experts of the Financial Monitoring Group of the Central Reform Office under MinRegion (with the support of the U-LEAD with Europe Programme and SKL International Project):

• Yanina Kazyuk, financial decentralisation coordinator
• Viktor Ventsel, financial monitoring expert
• Ihor Gerasymchuk, financial monitoring expert

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