Public Prosecution Service

Rationale

Personnel cost is 81% of the chapter's total expenditure and 84% of the operating budget. This is the correct shape for the line: the prosecution of crime is overwhelmingly a labour activity carried out by prosecutors, prosecution-office staff, and investigators. The function is a rights-protection function in the precise classical-liberal sense — it is the enforcement arm of the criminal law, and the criminal law exists to protect persons and property against involuntary harm (assault, theft, fraud, coercion). It is not a discretionary allocation of resources by political officeholders to a favoured constituency; it is the institutional machinery without which the courts in Chapter VI cannot function. The Public Prosecution Service is an independent, autonomous constitutional institution under Article 29 of the Fundamental Law, subordinate only to the law, and prosecutors are barred from party membership and political activity.[^1] Both the constitutional status and, more importantly, the underlying function place this line firmly in the Keep bucket. The honest qualification is on level, not on existence. Keep does not mean "exempt from review." Hungary's public-sector employment share is approximately 26% of total employment, well above the OECD average of around 21% and above Visegrád peers such as Czechia (~17%) and Poland (~19%).[^2] A standing-headcount review of any large public-personnel line is legitimate, and the prosecution service is not exempt from the question of whether its grade structure and headcount match its caseload. But that is an operating-efficiency review conducted by the service under its own constitutional independence — it is not a phase-out, and the budget chapter is the wrong instrument for it. The classification here is Keep precisely because the function is a precondition of the rule of law, not because the line is beyond scrutiny.

Rationale

This is the employer-side payroll levy on the personnel line above — social contribution tax (szociális hozzájárulási adó, SzocHo) and related employer contributions. It is the mechanical companion of the salary line and is kept for the same reason. It is worth noting what the figure shows about the structure of Hungarian labour taxation, because the prosecution service is itself an employer and the budget here makes the wedge visible. The 10,292.9 millió Ft employer levy on 76,700.7 millió Ft of gross salary is an employer-side load of roughly 13.4% — consistent with the 13% statutory SzocHo rate. That is only the first layer of the wedge a working household actually carries. On top of the employer-side levy, the prosecutor's own gross pay is reduced by 15% personal income tax and 18.5% employee social-security contribution before take-home pay is reached; and the take-home pay is then taxed again at the point of spending, where the 27% ÁFA — the highest standard VAT rate in the European Union[^3] — captures a further large share of each forint spent, with excise duty on fuel, energy, alcohol, and tobacco adding more on those categories. The state's cumulative effective take from full employer compensation, once the payroll and consumption layers are combined, is in the 55-60% range for a typical Hungarian working household, not the 13% employer levy that is visible on this single budget line. The prosecution service's own payroll is a clean, fully-documented worked example of a wedge that the central revenue chapters (Chapter XLII) carry in aggregate but rarely make legible at the level of one employer's books.

Rationale

Routine running costs — premises, utilities, IT, case-handling materials, expert fees, the operating consumables of approximately 100–130 prosecution offices at district, county, and supreme tiers nationwide. At 5% of the chapter envelope this is a lean operating-cost ratio for a nationwide institution. The classification follows the personnel line: the function is a rights-protection function and its running costs are kept. This is a routine line where the mechanism alone settles the classification; no hidden cost-bearer analysis is required.

Rationale

Renovation and refurbishment of prosecution-office buildings. This is the largest single capital line in the chapter and the only one where scrutiny is warranted: renovation programmes are exactly the kind of line where a one-off bulge can hide inside a recurring budget. The honest reading of the chapter data, however, is that 1,872.0 millió Ft spread across a nationwide estate of approximately 100–130 offices is a routine maintenance-cycle figure, not a prestige-project bulge — it works out to roughly 15–19 millió Ft per office, the order of magnitude of ordinary building upkeep. The function is kept and the maintenance of the estate that houses it is kept with it. If a future budget year showed this line multiplying, that would warrant fetching the underlying capital plan and classifying against the actual programme horizon; on the 2026 figure there is no such signal.

Rationale

Capital investment — equipment, IT systems, vehicles, and similar durable assets for the prosecution offices. The capital budget of a kept rights-protection function is itself kept: a prosecution service that cannot replace its case-management systems or its physical equipment degrades over time into one that cannot do the job. The figure is modest and the classification follows the function.

Rationale

A small residual capital line, 0.07% of the chapter envelope. As with the other-operating line above, the sum is too small to carry independent analytical weight; it is kept as part of the capital budget of a kept function.

Rationale

This is the chapter's one genuinely distinct line. It is an earmarked appropriation to pay out compensation awards that have become legally final — damages the state owes where a court has held the prosecution service liable, most often for unlawful detention, wrongful prosecution, or procedural breaches that caused recoverable harm. Far from being a candidate for cutting, this line is the rule-of-law principle operating against the state itself. A state that prosecutes its citizens must also be a state that pays when a court finds it prosecuted wrongfully; the alternative — a prosecution service immune from the cost of its own errors — is exactly the unaccountable state the classical-liberal framework rejects. The line honours final judicial determinations, which is the substantive property-rights-protection case that the framework treats as non-negotiable. It is kept without qualification. The figure is also a quiet performance signal: 30.0 millió Ft is a very small provision relative to the service's 94 milliárd Ft envelope, which is consistent with a low realised rate of damages-bearing procedural error rather than a systemic one.

Rationale

A negligible residual operating line — 0.007% of the chapter envelope. There is no analytical content to extract from a sum this small; the administrative cost of separately scrutinising or eliminating it would exceed any conceivable saving. It is kept as part of the operating budget of a kept function.