The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The Ministry of Finance, Planning, and Economic Development has warned Accounting Officers of dire consequences for habits of deliberate poor budgeting.
The warning was issued by the Permanent Secretary and Secretary to the Treasury-PSST in the Ministry of Finance, Ramathan Ggoobi, who accuses some accounting officers in Ministries, Departments and government agencies of committing budget games which he says is another form of corruption.
According to him, the Ministry has learnt that some accounting officers deliberately leave out critical service delivery items on their primary schedules of budget priorities, and later use them to justify supplementary requests that are partly suspicious.
Speaking to journalists about the government’s vision of growing the economy from USD 50 billion to $ 500 billion by 2040, Ggoobi indicated that the Ministry is committed to eliminating all wasteful and unnecessary expenditures, such that the available resources are spent strictly on productive areas.
He explains that their intelligence teams have realized that some accounting officers have tendencies to commit their primary budget allocations to less significant items such as travel, entertainment, and repairs among others, which they can easily twist for selfish gains.
He indicates that way; the key priority aspects are deferred to the tail end, and they are made to wait for supplementary requests.
Ggoobi says that besides standing on the suspicious requests, the Ministry of Finance is going wield a whip on accounting officers that are culpable of the irregularities that lead to unwanted wastages of public funds. For instance, in the last financial year, Ggoobi indicates that the Ministry rejected suspected sham supplementary requests worth 1.7 trillion Shillings from the various ministries, government departments and agencies.
He adds that the Ministry is working on a raft of strategic interventions that include among others; complete digitization of all government systems and public procurement processes to eliminate corruption tendencies.
The PSST’s warning comes at a time when the various Ministries, Departments and Agencies-MDAs of government are conducting initial processes of developing their respective budget framework papers for the next financial year.
Notably, the 2021 Cost of Corruption Report in Uganda by the Inspectorate of Government estimates that the country loses up to 9.14 trillion shillings in various corruption habits annually. It highlights that in 2019, the country lost shillings 614 billion to corruption in procurement and budgeting processes.
However, last week the Directorate of Ethics and Integrity in the Office of the Presidents sent a team of its officers on a benchmarking tour in Singapore to pick best practices for fighting corruption, such that they can be replicated in Uganda.
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