12 Nov 2023

Government through the Ministries of Finance as well as Communications, Knowledge and Technology has put in place short and long-term measures to improve the functionality of the now defunct Government Accounting and Budgeting System (GABS).

Updating Parliament on the status of GABS on Thursday, Minister Peggy Serame said from August 11 to date, the system experienced serious performance challenges.

Ms Serame said one of the measures to address the current hindrance was to migrate the system to a newly acquired server, while simultaneously optimising system performance.

She said intensive and comprehensive system log analysis, which was expected to provide a thorough understanding of event sequences, anomalies, and potential issues that may have influenced the system’s performance, would also be carried out.

In the long term, she said the current financial management eco-system would be reviewed to remodel it by implementing a more modern and robust system that allows for scalability and flexibility to accommodate future growth and changing business needs, which were expected to be implemented by December next year.

“Our commitment to providing a functional and reliable financial management eco-system is resolute. 

We are fully committed to resolving this challenge and ensuring that our system remains a robust and reliable cornerstone of our financial governance,” she said.

She appealed to all ministries to put in place measures to address all current backlogs of payments to suppliers and other concerned parties.

Despite challenges experienced by the system, Ms Serame assured legislators that cyber-security measures had not been compromised, hence all the data was safe.

The minister said despite the challenging environment, P7.1 billion was paid in August and P6.7 billion in September as well as P5.582 billion in October.

As per records from January 1, to July 31, Ms Serame said the summarised performance of GABS shows it had been down for a cumulative 33 days.

“The system became excessively slow to the point that it failed to process the normal operational processes such as travel requests, creation of Government Purchase Order , processing of payment vouchers and general updating of the accounts payable modules,” she said.

From the technical side, Ms Serame the system was consuming a lot of processing power to the extent that users could barely transact. 

She said the challenges had adversely affected the execution of financial transactions, especially payment to suppliers of goods and services as well as printing of annual tax certificates.

As a result of the situation, Ms Serame said 374 queries were received from clients who had offered services to government ministries, departments and agencies across the country and were yet to be paid. 

She said they had established a call centre and between November 1 and 7, close to 374 queries were received.

The Integrated Financial Management Information System , also known as GABS, became operational in 2004 as an automated premier financial system used to manage the execution of government budget by processing financial transactions covering receipt of revenue, payment of suppliers and public officials as well as the compilation of government financial accounts.

Since its inception, the system has performed well and it has a total user base of about 27 000 with a daily peak usage level of 5 000 users.

After  completion of the 2021 optimisation and stabilisation exercise, GABS has not experienced any major performance challenges.

Even though not certain when the rectification process will end, Ms Serame was hoping the system would normalise before the end of this month. ends