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{
    "id": 768628,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/768628/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 113,
    "type": "other",
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    "speaker": null,
    "content": "culprit. That is why we have cases of spending money at the source. Instead of remitting to the County Revenue Fund, they have local bank accounts in their counties where they deposit and then spend from there. Mr. Speaker, Sir, from the expenditure you will find that less has been spent on development. This is because when they receive their money, the personal emoluments, operation and maintenance always have to be paid first. However, on the developments aspect you will find that a contract has been awarded and has to wait to be paid. If the funds are not released, that is where the casualty will be. That is why we are having less absorption even in development, in some cases of some counties. That aside, there is the issue of adhering to the financial regulations such as the PFM Act where some targets or ceilings have been set that the personal emoluments should not exceed 35 per cent. However, you will find some counties going up to even 40 per cent as in the case of Bomet where I am seeing 44.6 per cent. There must be some way of penalising some of these counties because this involves maybe employing a lot of personnel while service delivery is less. These counties need to be penalised. May be it might require that when their budgets are being approved, they have to be forced to be within that limit. This is because laws are there to be followed. We make laws here such as the PFM Act and somebody just flouts them the way they want. They have to be penalised for that. In case of development, you will find some counties also not following the Act because they are not supposed to have less than 30 per cent of their funds set aside for development. However, you will find that there are some counties which are having more funds than others. For example, if you look at Mandera and Turkana counties, because of the amount of funding they receive, percentage wise, much as they may have the same staff, their personal emolument and operation and maintenance will be less. We even have to look at how much a county receives against the personnel and operation cost. We have to look at how to take this into account maybe in the formula of sharing these funds. From the Report there is also the element of frequent supplementary budgets without an emergency. For example, I remember in my county last year we had serious drought so we had to have the county assembly pass a supplementary budget so that we could have emergency funds. Unless in that kind of a situation, a county which had sat down, had a County Integrated Development Plan (CIDP) and annual plan cannot be changing its budget three times a year as is the case in some. That shows that the county government was not serious in the first place when they budgeted for that because they cannot be having their priorities changing three times in a year. They also need to be having some penalties on that so that the county governments can follow the law as they are required to. The Kenyan expectation is that when we gave ourselves a Constitution whose main item is devolution, then more funds need to go to the counties. Further, most of those funds need to be channelled to development and not operation, maintenance and personal emoluments. What is of direct impact to the local population is the service you deliver, not how many people you have employed from those communities. Mr. Speaker, Sir, from the Report, there is this element of pending bills. My understanding is that when you have been given Kshs6 billion to budget for and that The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposes"
}