★ Research Reports and findings
What the documents say when someone reads all of them
Short, sourced analysis of Liberia's budget documents. Every claim traces to a table and a page; every derived figure is reproduced from the database behind this site.
Three full reports — the first published free as a sample of the work, the other two available on request; eight shorter findings, each with its working on a data page; and a running log of the errors the documents make about themselves. Other reports are written to order, from the same tables: info@liberialedger.com.
Liberia’s Power Paradox
From the dam to the meter: money, management and the electricity that goes unpaid, 2010–2026.
Since 2010 the Liberia Electricity Corporation has had a Canadian and then an Irish management paid for by donors, an American compact of US$257 million that rebuilt the Mount Coffee dam with European and Norwegian money, US$673 million of partner loans and, in 2026, a record US$50 million appropriation. Its customers have grown fivefold since 2020. Yet of every ten units of electricity LEC puts on the grid about four are never billed, and its largest debtor is the government. The note tells the story in the order it happened, from every national budget since FY2014/15, LEC's 2026 reports to its Board, its monthly debtor tables and the Auditor General's audit, and ends with seven priorities the record supports.
The US$32 million question
The Tourism Authority's FY2027 request: the questions it puts to lawmakers, what it would require of the tourism industry, and what is at stake for Liberia.
The Liberia National Tourism Authority, operating since January 2026, asked the FY2027 Executive Budget Hearing for US$32.41 million: 8.8 times its first vote, twice the whole Agriculture sector, and a sum that would rank it 11th among the 120 spending entities of the FY2026 budget. By June it had paid out 19% of the US$4.20 million it already has. The report reads the request against every national budget since FY2014/15 and the half-year the Comptroller has just closed, and takes it in turn from the standpoint of the lawmakers who will vote the FY2027 budget, of the tourism industry, and of the country as a whole. On that record it finds support for a phased programme of about US$12 million in FY2027, released against conditions.
The 99.9% budget
What Liberia's FY2025 sector outturns actually show.
Liberia spent US$879.6 million against an FY2025 appropriation of US$880.7 million — an execution rate of 99.9%. Read by sector, execution ranged from 68.6% to 108.0%, and US$21.7 million moved between sectors during the year. The sectors that lost it were the ones the budget had promised the largest increases. Almost half of Public Administration is debt service; the swing line is goods and services; the capital programme was appropriated as 100% capital and executed as 62.5% capital. The government's own final budget then wrote two-thirds of the reallocation into the budget, and cut capital by more than a third, without changing its total.
Execution by sector, FY2025
Shorter findings, each with its working on a data page
These are the results the database has produced so far. Each is a paragraph on the relevant page, with the chart and the source table beside it; several are candidates for the next full note.
Errors in the documents
A FINDING IN ITSELF22 entries so far — six arithmetic errors in the FY2025 performance report alone, a US$37M reclassification between two documents that agree on their total to the dollar, and three consecutive budget volumes that print the same historical figures under three different sets of year headings. Each is recomputed from the source's own printed numbers and published rather than silently corrected.
Three from the log
- D8Identical grand total, different split. The FY2024 budget book and the FY2025 report both give FY2024 as exactly US$738,859,827, then distribute it differently — about US$20M out of Public Administration, US$37M out of capital.FY2024 book pp.26, 30–33 · FY2025 report Tables 1–2
- D13The same columns, relabelled three times. Three consecutive budget volumes print one identical block of historical figures under year headings that advance by a year per volume. All three add up, so the error is invisible from inside any one of them.FY2020/21 book p.33 · Special Budget 2021 p.31 · FY2022 book p.31
- D14US$818M, 830M, 847M or 848M. Four published counts of one year's domestic revenue. The year-end press figure is never the outturn, and it is the one that stuck.LRA press releases · FY2025 report Table 5 · IMF CR 26/98
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Reports on a sector, an agency, or a budget in the week it is published are written to order, with the tables behind every figure. Write to info@liberialedger.com.