Abstract：The 1999 budget reform is to transform Chinese budgeting system into a modern public budgeting system.One focus of this reform is to create a centralized administrative control within the government.For this purpose,it is important to transform the finance department into a real central budget office.Based on our investigation of a capital city government budgeting system,it is found that,although the finance department is moving toward such direction,due to the following reasons it is far from a real central budget office: several quasi-central budget office exist,anti-control strategies of the spending department are effective to some degree,budgetary process full of uncertainty resulting from the separation of the budgetary process and budgetary process,and lastly,organizational capacity of the finance department in resource allocation and operation efficiency demands improving.
