{"id":694510,"url":"http://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/694510/?format=json","text_counter":641,"type":"speech","speaker_name":"Ms. Agnes Odhiambo","speaker_title":"The Controller of Budget","speaker":null,"content":" Mr. Speaker, Sir, we had a meeting with the representatives of the county treasury on 8th September and the CEC in-charge of Finance did explain that the variance arose because of the way the IFMIS and the Internet Banking (IB) systems were reporting on the expenditure. Mr. Speaker, Sir, with your permission, I can explain. The payments for county government entities and also the National Government entities are processed through IFMIS. The payments are processed in the IFMIS system, but the transmission of the payment is done in the IB system. This is a Central Bank system. Immediately the payments are processed in IFMIS, if there were any commitments in the commitment column, they are automatically moved to the payments column. So, in the event that you do not click the approved button to transmit the payments, you will have this scenario. You will have excess expenditure although you have not paid because the commitments are sitting under the payments column. I hope I have made myself clear. So, the CEC in-charge of Finance explained that in the first quarter, that is what happened. They processed payments to the tune of Kshs70million, but they did not transmit. They processed the payments in the IFMIS system. So, ideally, all amounts that were in the commitments column moved to the payments column. However, they did not transmit those payments through the IB system. They ended up with expenditure being exaggerated in a way. When we received their return of Kshs616 million, ideally that expenditure should have been less the amount that was not transmitted through the IB system. So we had that discussion and what we informed the county is that we need to engage because this could be happening to other Government entities. We need to engage with the IFMIS directorate, the Central Bank team then ourselves and the county treasury. We discussed this and somehow reached a way forward because this will be able to assist other Government entities as well. One of the solutions that we looked at, as the office of the Controller of Budget, is if we could come up with maybe cut-off points that might help so that we do not end up with this kind of situation."}