Government to overhaul budget project documents with AI-friendly format from next month

The government will overhaul project description documents for the 2027 budget proposal to make them easier to analyze using AI. For the first time, it will also release project briefs at the government proposal stage — not just after the National Assembly approves the final budget.

The Ministry of Planning and Budget said Monday it has revamped the format of project description documents for the 2027 budget proposal to be AI-friendly, and has distributed updated guidelines on disclosing budget and fund management information to all ministries.

Previously, the government released project description documents only after the National Assembly finalized the budget. Starting this year, it is expanding the scope of disclosure to include project-level documents from the government proposal stage — the proposal submitted to the National Assembly on Sept. 3.

The move is intended to allow the public and the National Assembly to review individual project budgets, their calculation basis and expected effects before parliamentary deliberations begin, thereby improving fiscal transparency and the efficiency of budget reviews.

The format of the project description documents is also being redesigned so AI can more easily read and analyze the information. The overhaul reflects criticism that the existing documents — built around complex tables and free-form prose — were difficult for AI to parse accurately. The Ministry of Planning and Budget, in consultation with the National AI Strategy Committee, shifted the documents from a layout focused on visual appearance to one organized around semantic structure.

The table of contents has been reorganized by function — covering overall project information, budget summary tables, project descriptions and recent settlement records — to clarify the hierarchy of information. Merged cells in budget summary tables have been eliminated to simplify the table structure, and column headers are now required to carry specific labels.

Project overviews, previously written in paragraph form, will be broken down into discrete information units covering project purpose, content and legal basis. Monetary units will be standardized, and unnecessary borders and decorative elements will be removed.

The documents, which through last year focused mainly on budget figures and project overviews at the sub-project level, now include — starting this year — budget figures and calculation bases at the line-item level, along with project outcomes, external evaluations and settlement records.

The 2027 budget project description documents will be available to view and download on the government's fiscal information portal, Yeolin Jaejeong, and on individual ministry websites from Oct. 2, after each ministry completes its drafting and proofreading.