managing public sector records: a study programme - International ...

PROCESS TWO: In the second stage, enactment, draft estimates, are examined by
Parliament and in particular the appropriate select committees. In this stage, the
budget process becomes more public. The stage ends with the passing of an
Appropriation Bill. The budget session of Parliament is its most important meeting;
the different aspects of government policy are reviewed and considered.
PROCESS THREE: Implementation is the third stage of the cycle. The Minister of
Finance issues a General Warrant to the Controller and Accountant General, who
directs Treasuries to make payments. On the expenditure side, each public agency
now has its working plan as set out in the expenditure estimates. All public agencies
play a part in implementation by collecting or spending the public funds. The
agencies of the central administration of finance, however, play a larger role and the
records created are extensive.
PROCESS FOUR: The fourth phase of the cycle involves assessing performance and
determining variances between programme targets and what was actually achieved.
This provides the means of ascertaining areas of success and failure in
implementation of government’s fiscal plans and programmes. Described as
accounting, audit and evaluation, this final stage can be summed up as assessing the
government’s overall fiscal accountability.
Accounting records are maintained principally for the purposes of control.
Government accounting records must be sorted, registered, classified and stored.
Without the support of trained record keeping professionals, standards and
procedures, agency accountants do not manage their records effectively. This in turn
affects the preparation of accounting information and financial reporting.
Accounting documents such as vouchers and attachments provide evidence that a
transaction has taken place. A receipt is prepared whenever any sum of money is paid
to any public agency and a payment voucher, recording details of the transaction, is
prepared whenever public money is disbursed. Financially significant details from
these basic documents are entered into books of accounts, that serve as a means of
registering and locating documents like any register. Because transactions reflect
monetary value, it is also possible to list amounts and derive financially significant
totals according to the way transactions are listed. Thus the process of storing and
indexing financial records produces new information, a distillation or summary.
Information needed for accounting purposes is recorded on standard forms. They are
pre-sorted into categories, described as ‘batches’ and entered into vouchers.
Vouchers are stored in bundles and individual documents are located serially. At the
end of the accounting period, all vouchers are securely bound and batch labelled
showing the account title and period covered. The accounting practice of sorting and
then registering has the benefit of allowing various accounting activities to be
processed simultaneously. The registers created provide useful statistics and control
data. An invoice register, for example, will show the number of invoices processed in
any accounting period and their value, providing statistics of work load. This can be