“The Ministry of Finance has been undergoing numerous reforms to modernize its systems and processes and has embarked on a major IT project to replace the current 2-decade old Financial Management Information System (FMIS) and the 40-year-old payroll system.”

This was highlighted by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Strategic Planning, National Development and Statistics, Honourable Professor Biman Prasad in parliament yesterday.

The FMIS system is the accounting system for the whole of Government, when a budget is prepared and approved by Parliament, the Ministry of Finance uploads the entire budget appropriation on FMIS.

Funds are allocated to individual Heads of appropriations which is managed by the respective Permanent Secretaries who are the Chief Accounting Officers for their ministries.

Similarly, a “stand-alone” Payroll system is used to pay the salaries of all civil servants, including parliamentarians. This system is centrally managed by the Ministry of Finance to pay the salaries of around 35,000 civil servants.

DPM Prasad said that when the Payroll system was developed 40 years ago, it was one of the best available with any Government of our size and need.

However, after 4 decades, there have been a number of challenges including the fact that that the payroll system is not integrated with the FMIS which was rolled out in 2006 by the Qarase Government. This means that payroll activity is not available in FMIS on a real time basis. This lack of integration and control has led to the overspending of the salary budget by many agencies over the years.

“The Asian Development Bank, Mr Speaker Sir, provided a great deal of support for this project with its technical capabilities. We started with a technical assistance from the ADB to undertake an independent review on the current FMIS/Payroll system which proposed a way forward on the replacement of the 2 systems.”

“Hence a Request for Tender (RFT) with clear specifications on requirements, including the need for modern and best practice FMIS solutions was put out.”

The project was awarded, to the team from Bisan Systems arrived into the country and started work with the Ministry of Finance with scoping and development of the new system.
He further noted that:

• The cost is estimated to be around $12 million, lower than the $14 million allocated in the budget and an annual service fee of around $1 million.
• A 20-member dedicated project team from the Ministry of Finance together the accounting heads of various Ministries and Departments, along with the ADB consultants and the project team from Bisan have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to develop the new FMIS.
• After 14 months of hard work, the team is now doing the User Acceptance Testing for the system to ensure that the system meet the expectations and needs of the users.
• The Ministry will provide further training programs before the new system will “GO LIVE” on 1 August 2024, the start of the new financial year.
  

“Once we GO LIVE, the new system will bring about greater efficiency in our accounting processes, improve financial reporting, strengthen internal controls and audit trails and enhance the security of the system which will be web-based.”

“Mr. Speaker Sir, work is also underway to integrate the new FMIS with the Budget and Debt Management system. Currently, the budget preparation process is excel based and the Ministry of Finance is also working towards a budget software which will be integrated with the new FMIS at a later stage.”

(Source: The Fiji Government)