The Scope of Budget Acts in Iran (1979-2022)

Budget Acts are ordinary law and therefore should include items that are consistent with their title. Based on this feature, which is rooted in the principle of specialization of ordinary laws, only public revenues and expenditures should be included in budget acts. However, in some countries, such as Iran, the government and sometimes the legislature adde items to the bill that have nothing to do with budget or budgeting. Lack of knowledge of the scope of budget acts, the tendency of the government and parliament to legislate away from the control of the media and citizens, and the lack of a constitutional jurisdiction have been the three reasons for the emergence and spread of such a practice in the history of legislation. The emergence of the Guardian Council, with the approval of the 1979 constitution, provided the basis for better budget legislation. However, the findings of this study show that this institution, contrary to its model, the French Constitutional Council, could not eliminate the first two shortcomings because it could not extract, from the current budgeting laws, effective measures to identify the required, optional and prohibited scopes of budget acts.