State to reap from launch of online monitoring tool

 

The expected launch of an online tool to monitor spending by ministries and State agencies real-time later this month is expected to have a huge impact on the use of public resources.

The tool, dubbed Business Intelligence Dashboard, will give accounting officers, including Cabinet Secretaries, Principal Secretaries and Governors, a breakdown of expenditure by departments in ministries and counties through an interactive visual presentation.

This will, at the very least, rob accounting officers of the often-heard excuse that they were not aware of what was going on when questioned about loss of public funds in departments under their watch. The ground rules will shift further for these officers when parastatals adopt e-Procurement later this year.

Hopes are high that State House will keep the pressure up to ensure that these measures, laudable as they undoubtedly are, will be implemented to the letter and in their intended spirit because it is given that they are already facing massive resistance from individuals within, and outside the system. These are people who have made fortunes, albeit at the public expense, in the old methods.

This explains why a comprehensive analysis of the systems in use in these institutions found that half of the state corporations are still using manual and labour-intensive procurement methods, which are time consuming and easily manipulated.

The survey revealed that only a paltry 14 per cent of the institutions had fully automated their procurement systems, while another 30 per cent have partially done so.

It is also instructive that the National Treasury is only implementing the e-system, after President Uhuru Kenyatta directed it to do so last August during the launch of the IFMIS e-Procurement system for the government.

The law of unintended-consequences means that the government will reap other benefits from the implementation of the two systems. Had the systems been in place, for example, the Treasury Cabinet Secretary Henry Rotich would have had a better idea of how much money to expect from the ministries, following his last order to them to give an audit of their spending so far in order to free all the funds that are unlikely to be spent in the next three months. The intention is to divert these funds to urgent projects.

The two systems would also have enabled the Treasury to escape from last month’s National Parliamentary accusation that it has failed to tame the amount of money used in running government.

The hope is that Treasury took this accusation to heart, and will strive to get a better grip of the ministries and their agencies’ expenditure as the state is still losing money at an alarming rate if the latest Auditor-General’s reports are anything to go by.

Yet another benefit would be that the two systems will improve budget execution, which has nearly halved in the last three years. This has undermined the big infrastructure investments the country is making.

Financial discipline

The expectation is that better budget implementation - which has dropped to 43 per cent - would accelerate the country’s economic growth rate, and help reduce unemployment and the unacceptably high poverty levels.

Problems in budget implementation mean the country is unlikely to achieve the 6.9 per cent economic growth rate Treasury is projecting. This will be unfortunate because the country’s future, literally, hangs on achieving high growth rates. A slow-down of the country’s growth rate also undermines Treasury’s valiant efforts to balance its books and its success will depend on how well it can force financial discipline on, often unruly, ministries and their agencies determined to do things their way.

Perhaps, it has escaped the mandarins at the Treasury but its work would be made easier by having a free and independent Auditor-General’s office and an informed public. The reported proposal to stop the disclosure of audit findings to the public is injurious to the interests of the very people it, and the entire government, is sworn to serve.

The proposal to fine the Auditor-General a hefty Sh10 million or face a jail term of five years in the event of a public disclosure of the findings even if it was unintended is as ill-advised, as it is ‘draconian’. Treasury should persuade Parliament to reject the proposals.

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