Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Il Single Programming Document (DUP) it is the tool that allows the strategic and operational guidance of local authorities and allows them to deal with environmental and organizational discontinuities. The DUP constitutes, in compliance with the principle of coordination and coherence of budget documents, the necessary prerequisite for all other programming documents. The DUP consists of two sections: 

• the Strategic Section, which has a reference time horizon equal to that of the administrative mandate;
• the Operational Section, which is temporally linked to the budget forecast.

Il financial forecast budget it is the document in which the financial forecasts referring to each financial year included in the time period considered in the DUP are represented for accounting purposes, through which the governing bodies of the entity, within the scope of the exercise of their guidance and management function programming, define the distribution of financial resources between the programs and activities that the administration must carry out, in line with the provisions of the programming document. The financial forecast budget is at least three-yearly. The forecasts relating to the first financial year constitute the annual financial forecast budget.

The financial forecast budget carries out the following purposes: 

• political-administrative, as it allows the exercise of the direction and control prerogatives that the governance bodies exercise over the executive body and is the fundamental tool for administrative management during the financial year; 
• of financial planning, since it financially describes the information necessary to support public administrations in the political, social and economic decision-making process;
• allocation of resources in the budget through the authorization function, connected to the financial nature of the budget; 
• to verify financial balances over time and, in particular, the coverage of planned operating and investment expenses.
• Informative, as it provides information to internal users (councillors and administrators, managers, employees, audit bodies, etc.) and external users (control bodies, other public bodies, suppliers and creditors, financiers, citizens, etc.) regarding the programs currently being implemented, as well as regarding the financial performance of the administration. 

The process of preparing these documents is complex and involves, in addition to the organizational structures of the Institution, the City Council, which defines the outline and the City Council which has the important task of approving it. With approval, the Budget becomes "authorized" for the carrying out of all activities and programs for which the relevant resources have been allocated and approved.

During the year, the budget can be changed if it is necessary to take note of greater or lesser revenues or changes in the originally planned expenditure allocations (obviously all variations must be approved in financial balance).
As regards the aspects of “reporting” financial economic, the main documents are:

Il Financial Statement (or Final Budget) it is the document that represents the final results of the year with reference to the appropriations approved in the financial forecast budget. It is approved by April 30 of the following year by the City Council 

Il Consolidated financial statements   it is drawn up on the basis of specific accounting principles and legal provisions and highlights the financial and economic consistency of the Municipality of Milan and of the investee companies and bodies that fall within the so-called consolidation area. The consolidation area is defined on the basis of the control exercised by the Municipality over investee companies and organizations and the assignment of public services. Listed companies or companies that issue financial instruments on regulated markets, companies for which there is no control by the Municipality, companies or organizations whose financial statements are not relevant with reference to the financial statements of the municipality do not fall within the scope of consolidation. Body.

Il Financial balance compares two opposing voices:

• Revenue
• expenses

which respectively represent the resources available for the implementation of policies, projects and programs and their actual use.

The budget is drawn up according to a structure defined by law (see attachment) and the same for all Italian local authorities.
In particular, it should be noted that from 1 January 2015 the new rules and new "harmonised" budget schemes linked to the public accounting reform referred to in Legislative Decree 118/2011 and in the Prime Ministerial Decree of 28/12/2011 came into force. The Municipality of Milan has been an experimenter of the new principles since 2012 and has therefore adopted the rules and budget schemes with a harmonized perspective starting from 2012.
Accounting harmonization allows, through rules, budget schemes and unitary charts of accounts for all public administrations, an easier consolidation of public accounts at a national level.