Ministries to upgrade welfare database

The Finance Ministry and the Social Development and Human Security Ministry are preparing to jointly improve the database of government welfare systems provided to all citizens to ensure greater transparency in terms of data and reduce the number of bogus applicants.
Deputy Finance Minister Julapun Amornvivat said information regarding welfare provided to the people by the government should be consolidated now the government has encountered a problem in terms of whether or not recipients are truly poor or whether they have been correctly identified as disabled after providing 10,000 baht in the form of a handout to 14.5 million vulnerable individuals.
This raised concerns regarding the cleanliness of the data, so the government wants to gather all welfare data together in one place, he said.
In light of this, the cabinet has assigned the Social Development and Human Security Ministry to carry out this task, although the Comptroller General’s Department must also be involved.
The Comptroller General’s Department will need to gather information on the welfare database, including the location and how to connect the databases together.
He said that such a database is crucial for studying the Negative Income Tax (NIT), which the Finance Ministry wishes to use as a system for providing welfare to low-income individuals.
The bottleneck facing the implementation of the NIT is that if the welfare database for the public is not systematic, implementing the NIT will be challenging, as its success relies on the database, Mr Julapun said.
He noted that currently, individuals using various types of state welfare receive over 10,000 baht each. However, he did not specify how many people receive welfare payments at that level from the state.
According to current data from the Finance Ministry, in addition to the state welfare card, there are other welfare benefits provided to citizens, such as allowances for the elderly and the disabled, support for Aids patients, child support payments and school lunch funding for students.
In fiscal 2023, the government allocated a budget for citizen welfare, public personnel welfare, public sector salaries, including contributions to the Government Pension Fund and debt repayments, which are considered difficult expenditures to reduce, accounting for as much as 67.1% of the total budget expenditure for 2023.
Specifically, the budget allocated for citizen welfare amounts to 411 billion baht, representing 12.9% of the total budget, while the public sector welfare budget is 514 billion baht, accounting for 16.1% of total expenditure.
While difficult-to-cut expenditures are increasing, the trend of government revenue relative to GDP has been declining over the past 10 years.
In fiscal 2014, government revenue as a percentage of GDP stood at 15.6%, peaking in 2016 at 16.4%. In fiscal 2023, it stood at 14.8%.