Capacity building of financial controllers (phase 5)

From 15 to 19 March 2021, the 5th training session for Financial Controllers was held at the Yaounde Hilton Hotel. This seminar is part of the continuity of a series that started in 2020 and at the end of which nearly 111 Financial Controllers were trained on modules that take into account the trend in their functions and the institutional specificities of the structures to which they are assigned.

The meeting was chaired by the Head of the Budget Control, Audit and Expenditure Quality Division, representing the Director General of the Budget, who was unavoidably absent. In her introductory remarks, she recalled the objectives underlying this activity which started in 2020, namely:

• the need to comply with the provisions of Section 55 ( 2 and 3) of Law 2018/011 of 11 July 2018 on the Code of Transparency and Good Governance in public finance management, with the aim of professionalizing the actors, especially those in charge of budget control and audit and;
• enable Financial Controllers to effectively support public entities in the efficient execution of their budgets, by providing them with the necessary know-how to carry out their delicate mission of preventive control of these budgets.

The Yaounde meeting thus made it possible to present the thirteen (13) training modules ranging from the general framework of public finance management to ethics in the execution of public budgets, moving successively through the role of the FC in the PPBS chain; budget nomenclature of the State, PE and RLA; taxes and levies in the budget procedure; role of the FC in public contracts; optimal use of GIDOEP; internal control in public bodies; control of salaries and pensions; actors and tools for performance management; administrative drafting and archiving in a FC; budgetary procedures and reporting of activities in a FC and preparation of public budgets.

At the end, the following recommendations were made to MINFI:

• put in place an interface network of all the processing systems (DGI/DGB/DGTCFM/DGD) in order to resolve the bottlenecks in the production of budgetary and accounting documents and ease the actions of guarantors of public fortune by enabling them to have genuine and real time information;
• strengthen transmission mechanisms from DGI to Financial Controllers, registration receipts of budgetary documents in a bid to ease control and reduce the insertion of forged documents in the expenditure bundle;
• Harmonize the budget execution systems in PE by facilitating the installation of GIDOCEP in FC which do not have it