Progress Report on the Public Finance Reform, June 2021 to February 2022

A progress report of the Commission de Réforme des Finances Publiques et de Gouvernance Économique on the public finance reform, covering June 2021 to February 2022 and dated March 2022. It is organized by reform mission: the transversal mission, the sector missions showing the strongest initiatives, and the missions facing the strongest constraints, followed by final observations. Because the security situation made information hard to gather, the commission presents only the sectors for which enough information was available.

The context section records the shocks of the period: the assassination of the President on 7 July 2021, the earthquake in the south, and from December 2021 a sharp deterioration of security at the southern entrance of the capital and the junction with the Centre department, which drove civil servants abroad or into telework, cut international technical assistance to virtual missions, and slowed the whole administration. The 2020-2022 triennial action plan (PAT) had still not been politically validated, but is used as the reference framework because most actions were carried out under it.

On substance, the transversal mission progressed little between May and December 2021: of three programmes only communication (advocacy for fiscal transparency under the PAGEFIS project) and the search for complementary financing moved, while internal communication, the draft arrêté on reform governance and the training and change-management programme were stalled. The most notable advances came in the state financial information system mission, with the technical and administrative deployment of SIGFIP under the World Bank's rapid-results method in PAGEFIS, the UXP exchange platform, DGI web services and the start of a partnership between the DGI and the communes of the AMPAP association, and in planning, programming, budgeting and statistics, where European Union technical assistance helped the Direction Générale du Budget prepare the program nomenclature and train ministry planning units in results-based management, the macroeconomic framework was strengthened, prior visa by financial controllers was extended to all current and investment spending, and controllers were deployed to the centre in addition to five departments. Control, transparency and anti-corruption, and treasury and public accounting, remained the weakest missions: the revision of the organic laws of the CSCCA, CNMP and ULCC with EU support was unfinished, the ULCC carried out activities with World Bank, EU and Treasury support, and the DGTCP was setting up accounts-payable management in SIGFIP alongside a special payroll clean-up.