BAKU, Azerbaijan, October 22. Azerbaijan will
be able to prepare around 60% of its state budget through
electronic forecasting in the coming years, Finance Minister Sahil
Babayev said, Trend's
correspondent reports from the event.


Babayev made the remarks on Thursday at a conference in Baku
dedicated to the digital transformation of public finance.


He said Azerbaijan was implementing a comprehensive set of
measures to build a digital state and digitize public services,
public procurement, public finance and budget forecasting.


According to the minister, the president has approved a relevant
state program and action plan for digitalization. A council has
also been established to coordinate work in this area during the
current and coming years and beyond.


Babayev noted that the council, chaired by First Vice President
Mehriban Aliyeva, would coordinate digitalization initiatives
across all areas of the country's economic, public and social
life.


He stressed that the Finance Ministry's main objective was not
simply to move public services online, but to integrate them into a
unified electronic portal and ecosystem.


“The key approach is not the degree to which individual services
have been digitized, but rather the provision of various public and
public finance services within a unified framework through a single
electronic portal and ecosystem,” he said.


Babayev said the Digital Public Finance Information System had
been established under a presidential decree, and implementation of
several of its components and subcomponents had begun this
year.







The unified system will create opportunities for data-driven
decision-making, forecasting and analysis in public finance, he
said. Integrating various subsystems into a common framework and
linking their data will help improve the effectiveness of public
finance policy.


Speaking about ongoing digitalization projects, the minister
highlighted the electronic accounting component being developed
under the Government Resource Planning (GRP) approach, which
provides for unified digital resource management across the public
sector.


Work on the component has begun, and the system is being rolled
out in stages. Since August, more than 260 government agencies have
received relevant training, while the process of fully digitizing
their accounting reports has also started.


“We plan to register more than 2 million inventory items in the
unified electronic accounting system by the end of the year,
thereby establishing the relevant database,” Babayev said.


He added that the process would cover all public sector
organizations starting next year. In his view, it should be
possible to establish a unified register within approximately three
years, enabling the fully electronic accounting of public funds,
state assets and non-financial assets in Azerbaijan.


The minister said the register was expected to be integrated
with electronic contract, treasury and budget systems. This would
bring public finance data together on a single platform and allow
for more accurate budget planning.


“If forecasting is carried out through this register, we believe
that around 60% of the state budget could be prepared on the basis
of electronic forecasting in the coming years. Once the relevant
data have been consolidated in a single database, electronic
forecasting could be used for 60% of the state budget,” he
stressed.