COVID-19 and the need for public sector bodies to rethink priorities will make budgeting and service delivery decisions even more difficult in the coming years.

This will affect the public sector at all levels – European, national and sub-national. Since 2011 this EIPA course has helped experienced finance professionals and service managers make better decisions for delivering services to citizens – and in 2021 we are again partnering with OECD’s Territorial Governance Department to do so.

This year we will be concentrating on how COVID-19 has affected the public financial management cycle – budgeting, budget execution, planning and delivery of services and how it impacts on key financial/operational risks.

We cover how to:

• Prepare public sector budgets and service plans in difficult times by making realistic choices about priorities and thus make best use of limited resources;
• Link budgets to service priorities;
• Use budgetary control and operational performance management as tools to manage public services, including setting/using KPIs and when/how to deal with budget overspends and unfavourable service delivery

We also cover stakeholder impact budgets (such as gender-based budgeting), the role of multi-annual budgets and the challenges in performance budgeting.