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{
    "id": 921941,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/921941/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 397,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. Olekina",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 407,
        "legal_name": "Ledama Olekina",
        "slug": "ledama-olekina"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir. I rise to support the Public Finance Management (Amendment) Bill (Senate Bills No.3 of 2019). From the onset, I want to congratulate Sen. (Dr.) Zani for coming up with a very timely amendment to the PFM Act. I am one of those people who believe that the PFM Act should be entirely overhauled, so that it falls into devolution. This is because when the PFM Act was enacted, it was pre-devolution and there are so many things that are happening now in terms of technology, which we must take into consideration. We have had a big issue regarding counties collecting own source revenue. In fact, from our last meeting with CRA, the CRA was trying to come up with avenues to reward counties that collect more money through fiscal responsibility. This Bill in essence tries to deal with that issue and encourages counties to be prudent in their revenue collection. One of the biggest problems that we find is that in many of these counties, either there is a lot of capacity challenges in terms of the accounting officers or just pure corruption. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, when we were looking at the accounts of Kiambu County, we were shocked to see that counties were merely using templates from the national Government - whether it is true or not - to account for or prepare their budgets. Some of those templates also include the issues to do with revenue collection. If you ask many of the counties to provide you with a chart of accounts showing all their revenue streams, you will be surprised that not all counties can accurately give you all their charts of accounts. I challenge my colleagues to look at the financial statements presented by various county governments, and they will be surprised. If you compare 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 financial years, or any that you choose to, the figures will be different. You will see that in this account it is zero but in the previous year, it had about Kshs40 million. These are fixed assets; they are revenue streams. Mr. Temporary Speaker, Sir, I hope that we will take these amendments seriously and the National Treasury will look at them, so that they can start being proactive thinking. We have got 47 different county governments and each of them should have certain revenue streams. For example, in Narok County, we have revenue that comes The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}