Government’s ‘Good Governance Roadmap 2082’: Major Reforms in Budget, Tax and Public Institutions

Kathmandu – The government on Sunday released the "Good Governance Roadmap, 2082," outlining comprehensive structural reforms across budget, tax administration, financial transfers, and the capital market. The roadmap emphasizes citizen-centered policies, calling for a fair, progressive, transparent, and fully digital tax system. It recommends simplifying tax registration, filing, and payment processes while eliminating unnecessary paperwork and ensuring policy stability without frequent tax rate changes.For the budget system, the roadmap stresses transparency, openness, and result-oriented management. It suggests real-time public disclosure of expenditures, evidence-based prioritization, and adequate investment in key sectors like education, health, employment, and infrastructure. To address duplication of programs and resources across federal, provincial, and local levels, the roadmap proposes a shared project bank and a coordinated budgeting system.In revenue administration, it recommends a fully digital system with e-registration, e-filing, e-payment, e-invoicing, and face-less audit mechanisms to prevent corruption and tax evasion. For non-tax revenue, it suggests expanding income from service fees, royalties, and natural resource utilization, as well as restructuring and professional management of public institutions.The roadmap proposes the abolition of around a dozen public bodies, merging some, and transferring certain entities to provincial or local levels to make governance more effective, responsive, and streamlined. It emphasizes that committees and projects with defined objectives, costs, and timelines should be automatically dissolved once objectives are achieved.