The present paper introduces a mechanism aimed at controlling a practice commonly adopted by many government agencies which consists of spending the entire budget by the end of each fiscal year in order to avoid cuts in the following year's budget allocation. As a result of the proposed incentive-mechanism, the government will be able to induce a voluntary reduction in the agencies' expenditure. Consequently, the central government will not need to resort to "fiscal repression", a mechanism used to control agencies' expenditures, which causes many distortions in the public sector. A simulation based on data from fiscal year 2001 in Brazil illustrates the potential expenditure reduction when such mechanism is adopted.
public budget; public expenditure; mechanism design; incentives