FINANCIAL ANALYST John Jackson suggested this week that the Government was actually short-changing the public by publishing the budget in its current complex format and with inadequate information. Noting that the Members of Parliament in the House generally had no financial training, Jackson said very few understood the budget and were equally unable to explain it to their constituents. The House, he said, voted the national expenditure on the interpretations of the document posited by the parties' respective finance representatives, and usually along partisan lines. "The people we ask to represent us, I suggest, do not understand what is in there (estimates of expenditure)," said Jackson speaking yesterday as a panellist at an Institute of Chartered Accountants of Jamaica forum on 'Budget Alternatives'. Speaking on 'The Format of the National Budget', the analyst also noted that the estimates gave no indication of the interest rate and inflation rates that the Finance Minister used in deriving his figures, leaving the public to guess. He charged that it was unacceptable for the revenues to be presented two weeks in arrears, a situation he said that did not allow for any immediate determination on whether the budget was reasonable. And when the revenue side is presented, there is insufficient call for a credible explanation of the identified financing gaps and how they will be filled, he told the forum. Noting that the Government tends to overspend the approved estimates, Jackson said: "One gets the impression that the budget is presented only because the law mandates it." The Finance Ministry should be made to report to the House at points throughout the fiscal year on the actual expenditure versus what the House had approved to allow for the MPs to have a greater monitoring role over public sector spending, he said. "It can't be right for Government to make the budget, approve it, bust it up and go on its merry way," said the financial analyst. "There is a serious lack of justification for expenditures." Jackson also suggested that it would benefit the markets and businesses if the Government actually presented the budget before the start of the fiscal year in April, to allow for better planning and forecasts.