Studying Public Sector Budgets at the Undergraduate and Graduate Level

Abstract

Europe demands that its people be culturally and intellectually equipped in the ways that are suitable for their present and future. Only in this way they will be able to live meaningful lives in person and together. Higher education institutions play a key role in developing appropriate strategies as they are responsible for preparing their students for viable development of career and citizenship. Universities and other higher education institutions are increasingly realizing that their movement is a moving target and their leadership in the field of knowledge and understanding development and transfer means a new sensitivity to a society change. They are increasingly consulting their customers. Education inspires societal progress, but at the same time, it must respond with discernment to society by developing appropriate strategies for future study programs. Graduate studies in human resource management and national security programs prepare students for an independent national budget evaluation (acting as public finance specialists) which requires high qualification. The managers of human resource in the public sector are in charge of public finance expenditure accounting and budget matters in an institution and, besides typical knowledge of the budget, must demonstrate deep knowledge of public finance and the ability to combine human resource management and public expenditure issues. In order to achieve this goal, the Master study programme in National Security at General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania (MAL) partially provides the study of specialized subjects in the fields of public finance and budget planning. One of the most important subjects is the national budget which requires from the students a lot of prior knowledge in the field of budgeting and taxation systems. Estimating that the main purpose of governmental sector's human resource management could be public finance, it is useful to show students the differences in the approach of national budget operations and tax revenue purposes. The teaching process should be based on accurately selected cases obvious for students. From a didactic point of view, a properly selected case is the one that contains a lot of differences among national, government and municipal budgets and their records in the national legal system. One of the examples that meets the above criteria is revenues collected from different taxes. Settled income from taxes are one of the most important revenues for the national budget. Moreover, the principles of diversification of government and municipal budgets could be clearly understandable for graduate students. The paper presents the advantages and disadvantages of choosing different taxes for national, state and municipal budgets concerning tax burden for different groups of society. Furthermore, the purposes of teaching students public budgeting and the principles of 130 taxation are discussed. Amid the many preferences, the most important one could be a pattern that clearly shows different approaches to budget expenditures and tax diversification as an interrelated issue that is the amount of budget expenditures strictly correlating with taxable and non-taxable income in the public finance and depending on the budget legislation. Certainly, the indication of such relations is the essence of public finance budgeting. Practical applications are constructed from years of practice in teaching public finance, national and municipal budgets. Taxation theories were also indicated by the results of a survey carried out in a group of students studying public finance in the last academic year.