Public Sector Governance and Accountability Series: Budgeting and ...

Budget Execution 291
The financial controller checks the legality of operations. He or she checks
the commitment and authorization of all expenditure and ensures that
revenue, if any, is properly collected. The financial controller checks
whether all procedures were carried out, all authorizations obtained, and
all necessary signatures obtained. To carry out this task, the financial
controller has access to all the necessary documents and information.
The financial controller is subject to disciplinary action and may be
held financially liable if he or she approves expenditure in excess of the
budget appropriations.
Comparison between African budget systems
Significant differences exist between the francophone and anglophone
budget systems in the application of the principle of separation of duties
and, more generally, in the distribution of responsibilities in budget execution
management. These differences center particularly on the role and powers
of the ministry of finance and the degree of delegation of financial management
to spending units.
francophone systems. The separation between the authorizing
officer (ordonnateur) and the public accountant is a fundamental principle
of the French system. It applies for both expenditure and revenue (revenue
assessment is separated from revenue collection). This principle is an extension
of the principle of separation of duties discussed earlier, which in many
other budget systems is an internal control principle.
The public accountant, who makes the payments, does not report to the
authorizing officer. He or she is a staff member of the ministry of finance’s
treasury (or public accounts) department.The public accountant is empowered
to reject any irregular payment orders issued by the authorizing officer.
He or she has special duties and is personally responsible, in his or her own
money, for compliance and administrative errors. The payment orders are
recorded both in the books of the public accountant and in the books of the
authorizing officer. In principle, the authorizing officer and the public accountant
should reconcile their books at the end of the accounting period. However,
this reconciliation process is not always undertaken, as shown by the frequent
discrepancies between those two sets of data on payment orders.
In France and in Maghreb countries, line-ministry managers are
authorizing officers; however, in the majority of Sub-Saharan francophone
countries, the payment orders are issued by a department of the ministry of
finance, usually the budget department. The principle of the separation
between the authorizing officer and the public accountant still applies, but
between two departments of the ministry of finance, which concentrates the