By Ritah Kemigisa
The Ministry of finance has fired over 100 local government accounting officers over failure to submit their respective approved budget details on time.
In a July 7th letter to the Permanent secretary at the ministry of local government, the Finance ministry permanent secretary Ramathan Ggoobi says only 66 of the 176 local government officers have submitted their approved budget estimates reports for Finance Year2022/23 on the Programme Based System.
Ggoobi says because of such breaches, the ministry cannot release quarter one expenditure limits hence delaying commencement of the budget execution.
He further warns that this will delay service delivery including payment of salaries.
Ggoobi has now instructed the local government permanent ministry to nominate new persons for appointment as local government accounting officers for their respective local government votes by Monday, July 11th 2022.
Ggoobi first wrote to all accounting officers on May 25, asking them to submit the approved budget estimates in line with the corrigenda and changes by Parliament and submit to the ministry in the Programme Budgeting System (PBS) before June 3.
He again wrote to them on June 21, informing them that only 33 votes of the 161 votes had submitted their budget estimates.
Though he asked them to submit their budget estimates by June 23, the majority failed to meet the deadline.
He again wrote another letter on July 1, 2022, informing the accounting officers that only 32 of the 176 local government votes had submitted approved budget estimates reports for Finance Year2022/23.
