Can Budget Rules Help Reduce Fiscal Troubles in Illinois?
Fiscal analysts and credit rating agencies have criticized Illinois government officials for their fiscal mismanagement, especially the shifting of debt obligations incurred to pay for current services onto future generations. The growth of unfunded public employee pension obligations has been the most egregious example. Moreover, state and local governments have allowed bills for current services to grow unabated, while existing debt outstanding for capital projects has been refinanced beyond the useful life of the projects themselves.1
At first blush, remedies to such behaviors might seem to be simply a matter of mobilizing the will to balance budgets through spending reductions and tax increases. In some cases, the electorate seeks to discipline elected officials to behave responsibly. However, election discipline and public oversight often fall short. Elected officials may fail to reduce spending because they don’t want to appear to renege on campaign promises; similarly, tax hikes are seen to be too unpopular with the voting public. Accordingly, a helpful alternative is to build in budgetary procedures and practices that assist the public to oversee and discipline the fiscal actions and behaviors of their elected officials.
Given the sorry state of fiscal affairs in many Illinois governments, structural regulatory changes should be considered in order to hold officials accountable and to provide the public with clear and consistent information regarding the state’s financial condition. Regulations constraining fiscal flexibility could force policymakers to act more responsibly and limit their ability to make unrealistic financial promises and disguise questionable fiscal decisions.
In a recent paper by Richard Dye, David Merriman, and Andrew Crosby, the authors describe four fundamental principles of sound budgetary practice – advance planning, sustainability, flexibility, and transparency – all important areas of improvement for Illinois. The authors then outlined five methods by which Illinois could break its bad habits and adopt more robust budgetary practices.
First, Illinois should refine and expand multiyear budget planning. Currently, Illinois does not have a budget plan that looks far enough into the future, or that covers a wide enough scope of projections to maximize its usefulness as a gauge of fiscal stability. Some improvements have been made; for example, budgetary projections by the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability (COGFA) and the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget (GOMB) now cover three years. But they would be more informative and useful if they covered five years. Plans would also better measure fiscal stability if they covered a broader scope of projections. Currently, the plans only cover the general funds, leaving out hundreds of special funds comprising over half of the state’s budget.
Budget planning for a given year could also be expanded to include projected spending from current services, even if it does not affect that year’s balance sheet. This would help the state improve its advance planning by forcing officials to look farther into the future and analyze a broader scope of areas affected by current fiscal decisions. Furthermore, it might help the state address its sustainability issue, by holding today’s politicians accountable for future payments incurred by current services, rather than deferring payment of today’s labor into the future, handing the debt to their successors.
Second, the state of Illinois should require that meaningful fiscal notes accompany any legislation with a significant impact on future revenue flows or spending obligations. Fiscal notes, which are rarely used in Illinois, would include any cost estimates for legislation over a designated period of time. These would help Illinois better document time-shifting in its revenue and expenditures and identify nonrecurring revenue in budget documents. It is much easier for government officials to justify expensive programs or policies when the revenue flow is ambiguous and when one-time revenue sources, such as asset sales, are not disclosed.
Third, the authors suggest that the state should modify cash-only budget reporting to better track significant changes in liabilities and assets. Currently, Illinois relies on single-year, cash-basis accounting, which reports only receipts and payments in the current budget year. Accrual accounting, on the other hand, also covers changes in assets or liabilities that are attributable to that budget year, but not actually implemented until a future year. A cash-only budget allows the state to disguise time-shifting consequences of current fiscal actions. Moving away from this practice would make government spending more transparent by revealing deceptive fiscal actions, such as making payments with temporary revenue sources or promising to return loans in the future without continuous revenue sources to guarantee they’ll be paid.
Along those lines, the authors’ fourth suggestion is that Illinois should identify non-sustainable or one-time revenue sources in its budget reports, allowing the public to gain a better understanding of the time horizons of various revenue sources. Additionally, if the government must label one-time revenue sources, they might be compelled to put more continuous revenue sources toward a stronger “rainy day fund,” which would enable officials to be more flexible in responding to fiscal emergencies.
Finally, the authors argue the state should adopt a broad-based budget frame with meaningful spending and revenue categories consistently defined over time. Inconsistent terminology and accounting techniques make it difficult to track financial conditions and changes over time. For example, it can be challenging to tell how much of a year-to-year change in budget is real versus due to a change in accounting practices.
The state must not only clearly communicate a fiscal plan stretching farther into the future than it currently does, but must also make information more accessible to the public. Fiscal information should be readily available on a timely basis, and online information should routinely provide budget reports, with budget components consistently defined and explanations included when there are transfers between budget categories.
While these five practices would ideally lead to a much more sustainable financial position for Illinois, there are clearly roadblocks preventing Illinois’s government from adopting them, such as political frictions and the momentum of embedded spending and programs. For elected officials, it is often the case that in order to actually deliver upon the programs or actions they campaigned upon, they would need to generate even more debt, for example by borrowing from future budgets to pay off promised pensions today. And because Illinois’s politicians have been accumulating more and more debt for decades, it is unappealing for any of them to be the first to adopt more frugal behavior, perhaps by reducing benefits or scaling down public programs.
In the end, there is no painless path out of Illinois’s current debt crisis for citizens or politicians. But implementing these fiscal practices might serve as a way to ease the transition to better fiscal management, by giving politicians no other option and by providing the public with a more complete picture of where Illinois really stands.
Footnotes
1 The issues surrounding Illinois’s fiscal conditions, as well as proposed solutions, were discussed at a December 2015 conference, Transparency and Accountability in State Budgeting: Challenges for Illinois and Other States, held at the Union League Club of Chicago. The conference was summarized in a recent Chicago Fed Letter.
