St Maarten's financial situation came under the spotlight in late January following the rejection of the 2011 budget by the Dutch College Financieel Toezicht (CFT, the financial supervision council), which provides technical assistance to the authorities of St Maarten and Curaçao. The draft budget that was approved by the St Maarten legislature in December was described as unbalanced by the CFT, which instructed the authorities to cut the budget by a total NAf30m to NAf414m (US$213m). In rejecting the draft budget, the CFT stated that it did not accept the authorities' projection that GDP will grow by 2% in 2011-the CFT believes, as does the Centrale Bank van Curacao en Sint Maarten (the Central Bank) that growth will struggle to come in above 0.3% in 2011. The lower GDP projection undermines the budget's revenue projection. Moreover, fiscal revenue will also be lower than projected because the authorities had included in their budget calculations revenue from the higher turnover tax of 5% for the full 12 months of 2011, when in fact the tax was raised from 3% to 5% in February only.

An adapted budget was resubmitted on February 17th and is set to be assessed by the CFT. The redrafted budget has a larger deficit, totalling NAf61m-this includes NAf15m to cover a payment agreement with the civil servants' unions (see The political scene). In justifying the increased budget deficit, the minister of finance, Hiro Shigemoto, stated that NAf32m of the deficit would be one-off expenditure that would be covered by the government's cash reserves. He added that a further NAf14.4m would be met by implementing cost-cutting measures across the seven government ministries. Furthermore, he said that the authorities could not agree with the CFT's and the Central Bank's projected 0.3% GDP growth rate, but that they had revised their projection from 2% down to 1.3%.