From the 2026 budget audit
2 billion forints labelled 'other'. Bigger than every named line in this office.
A 2,000-millió-Ft line labelled only 'other' — larger than the NKFI Office's entire named operating budget, with no costed plan attached.
Roughly 910 Ft per full-time taxpayer per year — 2,000 millió Ft allocated to a line the budget does not name, larger than the entire operating budget the office does name.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: 2,000 millió Ft appearing in the budget for the NKFI Office. The unseen: what it actually pays for — because the label 'other operating expenditures' names nothing, and a line that funds a defined activity gets a defined name. The unnamed residual is the finding: it is a pool allocated by officeholders during the year, without a costed plan that legislators voted on.
Objection
"But every large organisation has miscellaneous operating expenses — it does not mean the money is misused."
Answer
The test is not whether the money is misused — it is whether the legislature can tell what it voted for. A 2,000-millió-Ft 'other' line larger than the office's named budget fails that test. Phase-out gives the office three years to itemise: genuine activities get their own line; the unitemised residual disappears. Either outcome is better than an unnamed pool.
Share if you think a 2-billion-forint budget line should name what it pays for.
The analyst's verdict
NKFI Office — Other operating expenditures
Rationale
This line deserves separate scrutiny precisely because of what its label does not say. "Egyéb működési célú kiadások" — "other operating-purpose expenditures" — is 2,000.1 millió Ft, a sum larger than the office's entire operating budget (1,733.4 millió Ft) and roughly two-thirds the size of its payroll, parked under a heading that describes nothing. A line that funds a defined, nameable activity gets named. A line that is 26% of the office's own-account spending and is called "other" is, on the evidence of its own label, a discretionary pool — the kind of appropriation that exists to be allocated at the holder's judgement during the year rather than against a costed plan fixed in advance. Where the state holds a pool of money whose use is not specified at the point of appropriation, the use is decided later, by officeholders, without a price signal telling them what the marginal forint is worth in one direction versus another; the allocation is subjective, and a subjective allocation of involuntarily-collected revenue is exactly the pattern the framework treats as rent rather than function. The burden of proof runs the other way: a 2,000.1 millió Ft "other" line is presumptively a phase-out unless the office can itemise it into specific, costed, defensible activities — at which point those activities should be appropriated under their own names and classified individually. Until that itemisation exists, the honest treatment is a short phase-out, giving the office three budget cycles either to fold genuinely necessary spending into the named operating line or to let the discretionary residue lapse.
Transition mechanism
Linear three-year phase-out. The office is directed to itemise the line: any component that funds a specific, costed, recurring administrative function migrates into Dologi kiadások under its own description and is appropriated transparently; the unitemised residue declines on a linear glide — 1,333.4 millió Ft in year 1, 666.7 in year 2, zero in year 3. The three-year horizon is not a protected-cohort schedule; it is the time a public body realistically needs to re-base its operating plan and re-appropriate genuine functions transparently, rather than an indefinite tolerance of an unnamed pool. If the itemisation surfaces real functions, the saving is smaller than the headline and the transparency gain is the point; if it does not, the full 2,000.1 millió Ft is recovered.
Affected groups
Recipients of whatever this line currently funds — which, by the nature of the label, cannot be named from the budget data. That is itself the finding. Any genuine counterparty reliance becomes visible only once the line is itemised, and the three-year glide gives time for that.
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