The Accountant General Department has said it needs K3.5 billion to go towards improvement of the Integrated Financial Management Information System (Ifmis) in the 2024-25 financial year.
Speaking to members of a parliamentary cluster at Parliament Building in Lilongwe Thursday, Accountant General (AG) Henry Mphasa said the new Ifmis project would facilitate the migration of the current government payroll system to a new one.
“The implementation of Ifmis has been in phases as, in 2021, we started with the module approach. We take modules that are ready for implementation and implement them.
“So far, the direction we are taking is working on the human capital module, where we want to implement things on the government payroll system. So we are, in a way, migrating payroll systems from the current human resource management information system to the human capital module,” Mphasa said.
He added that the new project would improve the management of finances in local councils across the country.
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“Local authorities will go through a rigorous business process engineering of their system and the result is that we will get them a new system because the system they are using is quite obsolete.
“Our concern is that there is an increase in the resources local authorities are managing. A number of development partners are implementing most of their projects through local councils and are also able to generate their revenues. As such, they need to have a system that should be able to address their concerns,” Mphasa said.
He further asked the committee to help in advocating for the allocation of more resources towards pensions and gratuities as they are currently standing at K120 billion.
“We are currently allocated K10 billion and, so, we feel that that is not enough to meet the K120 billion [amount] that we want to pay out,’ he said.
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However, committee co-chairperson Mark Botomani said the committee needs more time to understand the Ifmis development before providing support.
“We have argued that they need to convince us and give us a bit more information on that. Of course, we understand that there is a need to enhance the processes because, as you are aware, currently, accountant personnel move from far places to go to Capital Hill to process salaries. As such, we feel that that is unsustainable and expensive. So, there is a need for the allocation but they still need to convince us,” Botomani said.
The AG Department has been allocated K22.9 billion in the 2024-25 financial year against the department’s estimated budget of K28.4 billion.
