Dept on target: Ngangan

By JEFFREY ELAPA
THE Finance Department had achieved all the targets set through the finance expenditure accountability exercise, secretary Dr Ken Ngangan said.
Dr Ngangan said through the finance expenditure exercise, they were able to develop a road map that was focused to reform the department.
He said after achieving the set targets, they were now reviewing the assessment of the national public finance expenditure accountability exercise and started with the subnational level.
He said another gain was the inclusion of the integrated financial management systems that was at the department for 12 years but was not rolled out to other departments like National Planning and Treasury.
He said through the reform, they were able to rollout the system to all national departments within a space of two years and had started to rollout the system to the provinces and districts.
“This provided the platform for the management of public funds, and provided transparency and accountability of the expenditure of public funds,” Ngangan said.
He said the second major achievement was the clearing and production of public accounts.
“The mandate of department of finance is the production and four years ago, we only had public accounts production up to 2009, but now I’m glad to report that over the past four years, we’ve cleared up all public accounts and the latest done is 2018.”
“For the first time, in the history of public accounts, we had achieved that milestone by producing a public accounts which is a requirement by law that and we had done that for 2018.
“Going forward, with the assistance of the Minister as an accountant, we can clean up the public accounts well and that will provide some confidence to the people of this country,” he said.
Ngangan said they were also able to improve on their cash-focusing ability at the budget management committee and the public debt committee level, and Finance has been able to make a significant impact in providing actual cash flows at those meetings, together with Treasury’s expenditure focus team.
“And with you (Abel), we were able to make the public monies management regularisation (PMMR), and that is working well.”