Finance Minister Marinka Gumbs has submitted the draft 2026 budget (see last Thursday’s newspaper) to the Committee for Financial Supervision CFT for advice and is no longer proceeding with an earlier announced amendment to last year’s version. It will be interesting to see if the Committee for Financial Supervision CFT has an opinion on the latter.
In principle, this decision makes sense, considering that one would still be changing figures from 2025, already going into the second quarter of the next year. The current cycle of late budgets and after-the-fact revisions should indeed be broken.
However, the question remains whether government stuck to last year’s budget approved by Parliament despite the intended amendment. In other words, were other expenditures incurred or revenues collected without a budgetary basis, and what would that mean?
Nevertheless, at this point, the idea of moving on and focusing on 2026 seems justified. The goal is now to present this year’s budget to the legislature by May, and hopefully, the 2027 version per the legal deadline of September 1.
The minister mentioned having implemented an adjusted and realistic planning framework, aligned with a decision by the Kingdom Council of Ministers RMR in The Hague on January 30. It called on St. Maarten “to do everything possible, to establish the budget as quickly as possible, and where possible, to make up for lost time in relation to the submitted schedule by examining whether certain process steps can be combined or shortened.”
Based on recent experience, speeding up the realisation of national budgets has become a no-brainer, but great care must still be taken when cutting corners.
