After the Treasury and Budget Management Information System (Tabmis) Project is successfully completed, just by the click of a computer mouse government officials can immediately learn information they are seeking.
“Previously, officials of agencies, ministries who wanted to know how their subsidiaries use the state budget had to wait for reports from junior officials for months. If Tabmis is successfully developed, senior officials can immediately locate such information from a computer terminal,” said Vu Van Truong, manager of the Tabmis under the Ministry of Finance while saying targets of Tabmis. As scheduled, this project will start this year.
Many officials of financial agencies and ministries have been dreaming about a digital accounting notebook storing information on the situation of collecting and spending budget of agencies and ministries nationwide. The dream derives from the reality that the current information system of the budget management network hasn’t been perfect.
As a clear example, many state owned agencies buy public cars, building headquarters, buying equipments using capital taken from state budget, exceeding the fixed portion as the spending is not closely controlled. That is not to say localities often ask for a large amount of allocation when making annual budget forecast. Leaders of financial agencies and localities wanting to know information on budget earning and spending cannot update information, making the budget spending control less effective.
Lacking a common accounting system leads to presence of inconsistent figures that do not provide exact and sufficient information timely in public financial situation for leaders of the MoF and the government and makes information flows among ministries, provinces and donors incomplete.
The aforementioned shortcomings will be overcome via the public financial management project. The project is identified as one of the four backbones of the comprehensive state administrative reform programmes for the 2001-2010 period. The integrated information system is the most important content of the project whereby allowing to synthesize sufficiently and timely abidance of the state budget nationwide, facilitating information supply in order to improve efficiency of macro management, supervise revenue sources, expenses and exactly assess fiscal situation at necessary time.
The project is divided into four components: strengthening budget and Treasury management (Tabmis); enhancing and planning investment and state budget; promoting management of public debt; and assisting project management (with the total investment capital of up to US$71.45 million. Reportedly, Tabmis is the main component of the project.
By the middle of December 2005, a contract for Tabmis was signed with IBM Singapore worth nearly US$49 million, accounting for some 80 per cent of the budget expense of the public finance reform project including investment expense and post-investment operation expense. Tabmis will operate across the country from the central level to more than 600 districts of 64 provinces, cities at treasury, finance agencies, planning and investment agencies.
Accordingly, the function of Tabmis will be implemented by a group of components and complete integrated software, creating a unique interface with the user. This project employs international standard software that has been used by many countries. It will expectedly assist the state Treasury to control expenses by following different payment from budget approved until budget actualized. Users wanting to learn information can access to the server system of the State Treasury through the communication system of the MoF. The system is always closely controlled, only authorized people can access to the system and these people just can exploit data in their work’s scale.
As contracted, the Tabmis system will be developed at finance units. In long-term, the system will be operated at all units employing state budget. Upon establishment, Tabmis will store ledgers whereby recording all finance transactions related to budget revenue and expense of centrally and locally managed levels.
At the same time Tabmis supplies all necessary accounting reports for relevant parties timely. Tabmis also records tax collecting realized through the state budget to exchange information on budget collecting.
With such outstanding utilities compared to the current treasury accounting system, Tabmis will realize such a dream on an electronic accounting book thereby making budget expense and revenue transparent and managing budgets closely and efficiently .
When implemented, the project faces a lot of difficulties said Vu Van Truong. The first is how to make everyone from leaders can understand the meaning of the realization of Tabmis. In addition, when applying this software which has been used in many developed and developing countries in the world, there will be difficulties for Vietnam’s treasury system.
The first difficulty is the change of policy. If there are any difficulties in technology, we can easily deal with them with the advance of information technology, but unsuitable policy takes time to fix, especially in Vietnam where the amendment of some laws takes a lot of time.
Another difficulty is that the project will change the information system of the state treasury which is already stable. In addition, while implementing the new information system, it will still be required to keep the exact information on the state budget-spending situation.
What is worrying is that Tabmis will shuffle the current accounting system, affecting the benefits of many people. Moreover, in order to access and operate the Tabmis system, personnel training is an urgent requirement. The introduction of Tabmis will be required training and retraining 14,000 people.
Ngoc Dung
Vietnamese
