THE Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has rolled out a reform measure that aims to enhance the skills of government budget and finance management officers in effective public financial-management systems to address corruption and prevent fund misuse.
The DBM’s Public Financial Management Program (PFMP) has partnered with the Australian government to implement the program, starting with the Department of Education (DepEd), the country’s largest bureaucracy and highest in terms of budgetary allocation and spending.
Paul Seeds, PFMP adviser, said the program aims to enhance data quality through incorporating data analysis and improving current business process. The reform measures also include change in management and communication to ensure that all key stakeholders are kept informed of activities and progress.
The program has initiated the training of 5,000 DepEd bookkeepers and disbursing/accounting officers on the Unified Account Code Structure, or UACS; implementation of the Treasury Single Account, or TSA; and bank reconciliation. The initial training also includes mapping of DepEd processes to meet the DBM’s functional requirements, as well as inventory and management of information technology and communications.
“We need to break the current cycle of constant arrears and deal with backlogs on a daily basis,” Seeds explained. “We are helping the DepEd move and streamline their financial management systems toward full automation.”
The DBM said the DepEd and other government agencies are still using manual spreadsheets, which can be both time-consuming and inefficient. “Furthermore, where the systems are being used, in their current state, consolidation of data is undertaken using labor-intensive ‘cut and paste’ methods in manual spreadsheets, and combined reports, such as the Budget and Financial Accountability Reports, have to be produced manually, as there are no system linkages currently,” he said.
Among the proposed reform measures in the public-management system include integration; harmonization; robust architecture; improved controls; streamlined consolidation with full audit trails; robust multiyear, multiuser functionality; and strengthened reporting and query capabilities.
“These developments will make transaction processing more efficient, through elimination of redundancy, simplifying and automating data consolidation, fully automating report production,” the DBM said in a news statement. “The systems will then be an enabler for placing greater focus on financial management and analysis as opposed to merely transaction processing.”