When I first chaired the Senate County Public Accounts Committee, we produced a fiduciary risk report that described common risk issues.
We also provided recommendations that the House adopted.
One of the issues was contribution to the Council of Governors by the county executives, and the County Assemblies Forum by the county assemblies.
When the House adopted the report, the CoG threatened to go to court and even asked its members to make contributions for the litigation to challenge our resolution that contributions to the two entities were irregular.
So, as a committee, we have isolated those cross-cutting issues.
At the moment, we are working on the second version of the fiduciary risk report using the Parliamentary Budget Office.
What we are seeing in counties points to systemic problems because when you have the same issues cutting across all counties, it points to certain system problems and weaknesses in financial management in counties.
For instance, Ifmis is systemic. You find issues to do with variances between Ifmis and financial statements.
There are also systemic issues in human resources. One thing that comes up is whether staff are in the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Database or salary payments are within the threshold as PFM.
What we need to do, and what we have been thinking, is to organise a meeting of various parties involved in financial management in counties; the Office of the Auditor General, the Controller of Budget, the Commission on Revenue Allocation and the Senate to the root cause of all these.
If we don’t get to the root cause of these problems, then we shall be treating symptoms of the problem rather than the underlying cause.
Certain weaknesses in financial management, for example, the root cause could be the weaknesses or inadequacy of Ifmis and lack of proper controls in Ifmis where payments are made outside the system or voided after requisition from the CoB.
On revenue management, counties are not collecting revenues as per their targets. But the root cause is weak systems or systems with backdoors.
Out of the fiduciary risk reports that summarise the cross-cutting issues, our intention is that if we do the second volume, it will be followed by a conference where we will do a proper diagnosis, a proper surgery to get to the root cause of the issues, and propose solutions.
The chairman of the Senate County Public Accounts Committee spoke to the Star