TOUGH TIMES AWAIT BUDGET PLANNERS "Credit News 24"
TOUGH times await budget planners and accounting officers in local Government authorities as the government embarks on digital budget planning and reporting.
From tomorrow, the officers will no longer have to submit physical statements and the records will now have to be submitted online via an integrated system stored at a portal within the President’s Office (Regional Administration and Local Governments).
The systems dubbed “Planning and Reporting (PlanRep) and Facility Financial and Accounting Reporting (FAS) System” will be launched to facilitate the first ever central system anticipated to save 4.04bn/- in costs.
“ … We have 185 councils … and each of them has its own system of preparing and reporting budgets … there’s no uniformity between one council and another,” says Baltazar Kibola, Assistant Director of Information, Communication and Technology Infrastructure Section.
Initially, every council had to organise a meeting to document all the required information, then take the information to the regional secretariat and later to the president’s office before submitting to the Ministry of Finance and Planning for parliament approval.
Initially, every council had to organise a meeting to document all the required information, then take the information to the regional secretariat and later to the president’s office before submitting to the Ministry of Finance and Planning for parliament approval.
“Now the same procedure has gone digital … allowing easy and timely access of the information at all levels,” Dr Gemini Mtei, Senior Finance team leader at the USAID-supported Tanzania Public Sector Systems strengthening activity.
Despite challenges ahead of these innovation technology changes, Dr Mtei says a good team of focal point persons in councils and at regional level had since been trained to operate and feed the system.
On average, the councils spend at least 8.32bn/- preparing and reporting their budgets. With the support of USAID, the government has spent nearly 1.9bn/- on developing and training officers to operate the system.
“We believe in improving the value for money, good governance, human resources development and integrating ICT systems to better improve quality delivery of social services across the country … this is the reason why we embarked on to support the government implement the two systems,” Dr Mtei added.
Elaborating, Mr Elisa Rwamiago from the president’s office said the systems were ‘user-friendly’ and could “be upgraded” to fit other sectors. “… we’ve teachers who are not accountants … but with the new changes they will now have to account for money issued by the government … they must use the FAS system in reporting and accounting for all the public funds,” he said.
The launch will be presided over by Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa and will be attended by six ministers, notably: Dr Philip Mpango (Finance and Planning); Prof Joyce Ndalichako (Education, Science, Technology and Vocational Training); Ms Angellah Kairuki (President’s Office, Public Service Management and Good Governance); Ms Jenista Mhagama (Policy, Parliament, Labour, Employment, Youth and the Disabled) and the host, Mr George Simbachawene (PORALG
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