Report on the Progress of Public Finance Reform, June 2020 to April 2021

The Commission de Réforme des Finances Publiques et de Gouvernance Économique reports on the progress of Haiti's public finance reform between June 2020 and April 2021. The report is dated June 2021.

It opens on context. After the socio-political disturbances of 2018 and 2019, Haiti faced the coronavirus pandemic from January 2020 while insecurity rapidly worsened. Public administrations moved their staff onto rotation and the institutions concerned grew hesitant. Foreign experts had difficulty travelling and preferred to work remotely, several international technical assistance missions were postponed, and the financial and technical support the reform usually receives fell off. Budget support suffered too: even European Union disbursements, which normally follow a fixed calendar, were delayed.

On the framework, the report records that the reform strategy was revised onto a logical framework of five levels, missions, programmes, actions, activities and tasks. The new PAT 2020-2022 is structured into seven missions, six sectoral and one transversal. The 2014-2016 and 2016-2018 action plans used domains instead. It carries a results matrix tied to each mission together with an indicative costing. The report calls that a significant advance. The plan had been validated technically with every Haitian entity involved but not yet politically, because of constraints on the side of the technical and financial partners, and the report nonetheless uses it as the reference framework for judging the period.

The body follows that structure: mission 7, the transversal reforms, covering operationalisation, communication, and training and change management; the traditional leader group, covering treasury management and public accounting, the state financial information system, domestic and external resource mobilisation, and the governance of local finances; and the group of missions that habitually performs less well, covering control, transparency and anti-corruption, and planning, programming, budgeting and statistics.

The conclusion attributes progress to two factors named in the previous report, the availability and commitment of national institutional teams and the multiform support of international cooperation, and finds both reaffirmed but heavily conditioned by the political and institutional context. Among the partners it names the European Union and the World Bank as the most prominent, with USAID through GERE, Canadian cooperation and the IMF less intensive than before. It groups the advances in three: new transversal work, the launch of the FOAD project and the establishment of PARFIP; structuring actions in the leader group, including the DSI, SIGFIP, UXP, accounting posts, RMS and SYDONIA rollouts, tax reform and CIVITAX; and changes in the weaker group, including the public procurement programme's work on modernising the legislative and regulatory framework, professionalising procurement actors, and absorbing the CNMP's strategic plan.