Andhra Pradesh to implement e-governance initiative for financial management

Hyderabad: As part of its e-governance initiatives, the Andhra Pradesh government would soon put in place an IT-enabled platform to make the entire system of payments and disbursements online.

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, known for his IT-savvy ways, held a meeting with finance department officials on the plan to implement the Comprehensive Financial Management System (CFMS), a state government release said on Wednesday.

The CFMS aims to make payment of salaries, expenditure and budget management, disbursement of funds for public welfare schemes and works, debt information and accounts online, it said.

This will be implemented on a pilot basis in Guntur and Chitoor districts from this month.

In the remaining offices, it will be done in a phased manner by June 2015. The chief minister has given a nod to decentralise public finances management.

"This means there will be no drawing officers. Currently, the state has 40,850 drawing officers, 280 HODs (Heads of Departments) and establishment staff who are disbursing funds for 5.8 lakh employees and 2.3 lakh pensioners in the state.

"The CFMS will rid the government officials of tedious work of manually sending bills to the treasury and waiting for 4-5 days to clear them," the release said.

According to finance department, the CFMS includes digitising the employees' service register.

The CFMS would help in better planning of the state budget by giving real-time information on the available finances and allot budget to sectors based on priority.

In districts, the chief minister suggested the appointment of a finance manager under the supervision of collector. The finance manager will keep an eye on district finances and detect misappropriation of funds.

For instance, if a contractor has been allotted work, video footage of the work will be recorded and his name registered, after which funds would be disbursed, it said.

The employees will be imparted technological skills by experts from NIT and Deloitte in handling the CFMS. By next year second quarter, the entire system of payments and disbursements will be online, the release said.

Elaborating the benefits of the system, officials said the CFMS will increase effectiveness of public finances management, increase accountability of government, integrate management of public finance, reduce third parties interface, increase substantial savings, update employee census accurately and most importantly, eliminate fraud.

"The implementation of CFMS will ensure financial discipline, improve speed and efficiency of service delivery in G2G, G2B, G2E and G2C models and will be the single source of truth," the release said.

Noting that Andhra Pradesh would be the first state to implement a comprehensive ERP solution for public finances management, it said the CFMS covers all aspects of 'e-Treasury Mission Mode Project'.

This will also include geo-referenced project management, trends analysis and also have a database of vendors, suppliers, beneficiaries, employees and pensioners through web portal/ citizen interface portal.

"The CFMS, to be made a highly secure system, will be a risk-based adaptive authentication to validate the user authenticity and usage pattern, biometric authentication and digital signature for financial transactions, identity management and single sign on to all valid users, firewall systems, network forensics - monitoring and analysis of computer network traffic, audit trail at every level of transaction to identify users," the release added.