CI-NEWS

Finance officials pave way for digitization

2020-08-24

No: 525

Finance officials pave way for digitization.

On the strength of an April 30, 2020 resolution by the Monetary Union of the Central African Sub region, for member States to comply with the switch to digitise the finance system, top officials from the Ministry of Finance have begun acquiring knowledge on how the new system shall run.

Championing the course, the Director of Public Accounting at the General Directorate of Treasury, Finance and Monetary Cooperation, Nestor Achille Basahag, says they have begun laying the ground work for an effective switch. This is in a bid to maintain the status quo of the country as the sub-region’s economic hub. The Central African Interbank Group, a sub-regional entity whose role is to promote electronic banking as well, has been working to facilitate an inclusive system that can be afforded by even the very smallest business actors.

Speaking at the working sessions, the Director General of the Interbank Group, Valentin Mbozo’o, stressed on the need to upgrade, saying everything else is going global. The group wants to support the state in securing financial resources by digitizing the tax system as well as other dues, not leaving out expenditures as well. Another key feature the novelty proffers is the digitization of the salary system in Cameroon.

Ghost Workers

“Today’s working session is critical. It is a question of digitizing the financial transactions of the administration, the receipts and the disbursements of the State through the canons and the electronic payment instruments which will provide a single transaction channel that will alleviate possibilities of fraud. It will make things easier for the population,” indicates Valentin Mbozo’o.

The update is also expected to among other things, rid the system of ghost workers who have continued to waste State resources. A campaign to clean the State payroll was in 2017, launched by the Minister of Finance, Louis Paul Motaze. Actors in the domain say the move has paid off as several ghost workers were detected and further unmerited payments, amounting to billions are said to have been averted.

Summing up the deliberations, the Director General of the Interbank Group, Valentin Mbozo’o, says the new approach will enable the Finance Minister to have a panoramic view of all the transactions effected in his Ministerial Department.

“The Minister of Finance wants to have a perfect view of what is happening in the Ministry of Finance, a view he does not have today because things were haphazard and disjointed; customs on one side, treasury, taxation and the like. We are therefore developing a system to interface all of this and be able to provide information for better control of the country’s money supply, the traceability of financial flows and tax evasion,” he stressed.

Culled from Cameroon Insider

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Finance officials pave way for digitization