Without really trying to, the IMF has given the Dominican Government a means by which it can “overvalue” the Budget and produce a surplus of billions of pesos that the Executive Branch can use by requesting certain appropriations from the Congress. As reported in the Listin Diario, the “stubbornness” of the IMF to fix the exchange rate of reference for the payment of the debt service charges and to assign the value of the debt that the government had to renegotiate has generated a different sort of reality from the suppositions of a year ago. By different means, the budget for 2005 has returned to the old practice of overvaluing some items and undervaluing others, in such a way that, in the end, a different budget altogether is executed. This was standard practice under the regimes of late President Joaquin Balaguer. The “strategy” consisted of fattening up the expenses to be incurred under international financing while reducing or underestimating expenses to be incurred with local income. This produced a favorable scenario for the government by two means. First, as the income from external sources became available, the various projects were carried out in direct proportion to the income received. But, as internal income always surpassed the projects that were in the budget, the Executive was able to manage 85% of the surplus. In the current case, the IMF forced the Dominican Republic to create a budget based on an exchange rate that was set at RD$37 to the dollar. Currently the exchange rate is around RD$28, and has been for over five weeks. The IMF’s demands were based on an exchange rate calculated for 2004 at RD$45.00 per dollar, but even before the budget was passed, the peso had depreciated below this level. As a result of the “bad experience” of the IMF, the Dominican Government has saved nearly US$400 million is payments on its foreign debts, practically the only item in the budget that is “dollarized.” At first, debt payments were scheduled to be RD$5.33 billion per month, but under the current circumstances, the payments are using about RD$2.0 billion per month, a savings of 60%.