Results-Restitution Seminar for the Organizational Audit of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF)
Summary: Proceedings of a November 2015 seminar restituting the results of an organizational audit of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), carried out under the EU-financed State Building Contract program supporting institutional reform of the Haitian state, three years after the program launched its support to redrafting ministries organic laws.
Key Findings
- The MEF audit was one of six ministry audits under the same framework, not a standalone exercise. MEF, Interior and Territorial Authorities, Planning and External Cooperation, Justice and Public Security, and Education and Vocational Training were audited together, with Foreign Affairs added, each audit paired with a review of its draft organic law.
- The seminar's centerpiece was the decree of 20 October 2015 setting the fundamental rules for the nature, content, preparation, presentation and adoption of budget laws, published in Le Moniteur of 23 October 2015. MEF's own Deputy Director General for Budget presented it as a financial constitution introducing multi-year budgeting, program budgets, results-based management, separation of the authorizing officer from the accounting officer, a treasury single account, and transparency and accountability. The decree was one month old when the seminar was held.
- The audit and the organic-law reform were deliberately joined: the analysis of the existing situation identified the ministry's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and the working groups were asked to produce a synthetic description of essential missions specifically for the articles of the organic law. Organizational diagnosis was being converted directly into legal text.
- The six working groups map the reform's real fault lines: the DG and Secretariat General with the studies and programming unit on strategy, steering and arbitration; the operational directorates on clarifying core business from support functions; coordination of the support directorates (administration and budget, human resources, information systems, legal affairs, communication); audit, control, monitoring and evaluation with results-based management and program budgets; the relationship between the MEF center and the departmental directorates, deconcentrated services, autonomous bodies and partners including MPCE; and information technology, internal and external communication, and information-system protection.
- The reform was three years old at the time of the seminar, launched on 28 November 2012, and the document states it remained a major national priority, tied to the PSDH objective of Haiti as an emerging country by 2030.
- The exercise was financed by the European Union through the State Building Contract, a budget-support operation coupled with technical assistance, and the MEF audit was carried out by a European governance and state-reform expert, Anne Azam-Pradeilles, under project component MCT_05 on support to the overhaul of organic laws.
How to cite
Office of Management and Human Resources (OMRH), 2015, Results-Restitution Seminar for the Organizational Audit of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), http://omrh.gouv.ht/Media/Publications/Autres/HAITI_SBC_OMRH_MEF_seminaire_restitution_24112015.pdf