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{
    "id": 545672,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/545672/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 146,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. (Ms.) Otucho",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 12837,
        "legal_name": "Mary Emaase Otuch",
        "slug": "mary-emaase-otuch"
    },
    "content": "expenses relating to pending bills are supposed to have been budgeted for. If a function is budgeted for, funds should be available for it. Therefore, we should not continue having pending bills in or budgets. For example, if you are paying an employee, you should remit the PAYE component of that payment directly to the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA). If you are paying a supplier, you should be able to remit the corresponding portion of the tax to KRA. So, why do we continue to see pending bills in our budgets? The accounting officers should be answerable. This House has to come up with measures to ensure that this issue does not recur, even if it means legislating. The Public Finance Management Act is very clear. It should be a first charge, if you have pending bills. However, that is not the case. There is a deliberate attempt not to comply with the regulation that actually guides the processing of these payments. This is a concern. We hope that in the next financial year, we will be seeing pending bills appearing again. On salaries and remunerations, again every organisation has an establishment. This should appear as an item of expenditure in the Budget when the year begins. Every institution has a strategic plan. You know that you will have certain tasks, and that you require certain numbers of personnel, and that this needs to be done within a certain period of time. So, why does this not appear in the main Budget? Why does it have to appear in the Supplementary Budget? This is a sign of poor planning. We should not even be having Supplementary Budget if we had proper planning in the way we do our budgets. If it is as a result of increments, again, we should be wary. This should be a concern because if it spills over, it means that we are paying too much. The Government is giving too many increments, and this spills over to the private sector. It will not be very conducive to investment. Already, there are companies and investors who are packing their bags and moving to other countries because of high labour costs. That is an issue which needs to be looked into. Looking at other areas, the transfer to the Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) to cushion farmers is a good allocation because that is an important sector. With those remarks, I beg to support."
}