Sri Lanka’s Committee of Public Finance (CoPF) and other budgetary bodies may avail to US Congressional budget offices’ assistance in order to use artificial intelligence (AI) in predicting the outcomes of financial models, House Democracy Partnership Executive Director Derek Luyten informed the CoPF recently.
Responding to a request made by CoPF Chairperson Harsha de Silva on the need for using technology for testing financial assumptions, Luyten said: “That’s something that our Commission has done, several times over, with the House Democracy Partnership around the world with other parliaments.”
“It is something that we were speaking (about) with the Secretary General, on the use of AI. It’s a recent development: Just within the last year or two, but it’s something that we now rely on to help predict financial models as well. What is a 0.1% increase on this - how does that affect revenue overall? And these models are now instantaneous, it’s very quick.”
According to its own website, The House Democracy Partnership (HDP) is a commission of the US House of Representatives that involves itself with legislative institutions in partner countries, through peer-to-peer exchanges and technical assistance.
De Silva explained that the CoPF needed more oversight into revenue collection, testing likely scenarios through financial models, and sensitivity analysis to determine what kind of revenue that may be received, and what kind of expenditure the government may have to incur, within its Budgetary estimates.
“So, using technology to do that would be a game changer, if you're not currently doing that, it would make work far more efficient,” Luyten continued. “Perhaps there’s far fewer assumptions or perhaps safer assumptions. That’s something that our Congressional budget office in the US House of Representatives does for us. It’s something that we often do. We'll bring those experts from the institutions to other parliaments and have them liaise directly with your technical staff, to make progress on that,” Luyten said.
Speaking on the Parliamentary Budget Office that is yet to be established, de Silva stated: “We passed legislation in 2024 to establish the Parliamentary Budget Office. We now have a piece of legislation to do that.”
However, according to de Silva, the Office is yet to be established. “We still haven’t been able to get that completed.”
He further conceded that external challenges, such as the transition from the Interim Budget Office towards a separate Parliamentary Budget Office had not been foreseen.
“The CoPF set-up an Interim Budget Office during the last parliament, which we expected to dovetail into a bigger establishment, but those resources, we don’t, any longer have.”
“The Parliamentary Budget office per se, at the beginning will be a 20-person set-up. We are in the process of hiring a Parliamentary Budget Officer, and a Deputy Budget Officer. It is a high-ranked position, it has to be cleared by the Constitutional council. Ideally we would like to have somebody with global experience, who has done it before. We have seen dozens of applications in the past year, but we haven't picked anyone yet,” de Silva said.
“It is this committee that would approve its budget, approve its work plan. It is this committee that would liaise with the independent budget office. And through the independent budget office, any committee, any member would be able to request various types of analysis. But it is for us, I believe it would be most useful.”
“We do not have any of that capacity, currently. So, in partnership, capacity building, using technology, and modelling are things that we would look for in partnership,” de Silva added.
During a recent discussion over the budget estimates of the National Audit Office (NAO) with the CoPF, attention had been drawn to the severe shortage of Chartered Accountants within the office that audits at least 2,000 government institutions, ministries, departments, foreign projects and state enterprises.
Officials of the Auditor General’s Department stated that at present only about 35 Chartered Accountants served in the NAO, due to the prevailing salary scales, which has proven difficult to retain such persons who have passed the higher examination bars in accountancy.
An official statement released by the CoPF stated that the possibility of enhancing efficiency through the use of AI, had also been explored during the meeting.