Financial Management Report 2011

Financial management at the Ministry of Justice has improved considerably since the National Audit Office last examined this subject in 2010 (HC 187, ISBN 9780102965339). The Ministry now has effective governance structures in place and, in 2010-11, managed its money far more effectively, allowing it to redeploy funds to where they were most needed. Financial management is now much more central to the operation of the organisation and the quality and consistency of financial planning and forecasting have improved. Financial information for decision making is more relevant and useful, with the Ministry's planning work allowing it to bring together a wide range of business information to estimate the financial implications of its workload. It has also improved oversight of its arm's-length bodies. The Ministry still has gaps in financial reporting skills and some of its underlying systems need further improvement. It was one of only two government departments that failed to produce their financial accounts by the 2011 summer Parliamentary recess, mainly due to the accounts for the National Offender Management Service being produced late. The Legal Services Commission, an arm's-length body of the MOJ, had the audit opinion on its 2010-11 accounts qualified owing to the potential level of error, put at an estimated £50 million. There has also been little change in how the Ministry monitors and collects assets due under confiscation orders, with the amount of outstanding debt having increased by almost £400 million in 2010-11.

Despite the fact that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has made improvements in its financial management, the NAO cannot yet conclude that the Department is achieving value for money in its financial management activity. This is because the spending watchdog expected faster progress in improving performance since it last reported in 2008 and a higher level of financial maturity, given the resources spent and the focus on financial management. The Department has undertaken a number of projects designed to strengthen its financial management. These have had some positive results, such as revised management reporting and improved forecasting, although the Department has not fully assessed all the benefits of these projects. Despite increasing the number of permanent, qualified finance staff and also offering financial skills training courses for non-financial staff, there are still weaknesses in financial capability. Financial skills could also be better integrated across the Department. The Department should also focus on improving its commercial skills, such as contract management. It should also develop a strategic model for engagement with its arm's-length bodies, to understand the risks that they face and opportunities open to them. Since 2002, Defra has consistently underspent against its Parliamentary estimate. The underspend in 2010-11 was £530 million (10 per cent). The Department has, however, improved its management of expenditure against its departmental expenditure limit, reducing its underspend in 2010-11 to £34 million (one per cent of expenditure).

Following the spending review, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is targeting a 27 per cent reduction, after inflation, in core resources between 2010-11 and 2014-15. However, this does not take account of a near doubling in student loan payments arising from the higher education reforms, much of which the Department expects will be repaid sometime after 2014-15. Once these are included, the Department's total spending is forecast to reduce by 6 per cent, after inflation, during the four year period. The Department is also working on a number of other reforms associated with the settlement, including attracting private investment into Royal Mail, setting up the Green Investment Bank by September 2012, and providing £1.3 billion to modernise the Post Office network. The Department has worked hard over the last 18 months to improve its financial management, and current practices have enabled it to keep its day-to-day financial management on track. However, the Department recognises that its current financial management capacity and skills will not be sufficient if it is to manage the substantial challenges ahead. It is implementing a number of change programmes aimed at integrating financial management across the department and its partner organisations. The outcomes of this are as yet unclear and the NAO has identified key areas for action. These include improving the quality of information available to support decision-making, strengthening cross-department arrangements for scrutinising investment proposals, and improving sponsorship of partner organisations.

To operate as effectively and efficiently as possible and to make difficult decisions to address the federal government's fiscal challenges, Congress, the administration, and federal managers must have ready access to reliable and complete financial and performance information-both for individual federal entities and for the federal government as a whole. Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key federal financial management reforms in the 1990s, GAO's report on the U.S. government's consolidated financial statements illustrates that much work remains to improve federal financial management. Further improvements are urgently needed. GAO found the following: *Certain material weaknesses in internal control over financial reporting and other limitations on the scope of its work resulted in conditions that prevented GAO from expressing an opinion on the fiscal years 2012 and 2011 accrual-based consolidated financial statements. About 34 percent of the federal government's reported total assets as of September 30, 2012, and approximately 21 percent of the federal government's reported net cost for fiscal year 2012 relate to the Department of Defense (DOD), which received a disclaimer of opinion on its consolidated financial statements. *Because of significant uncertainties, primarily related to the achievement of projected reductions in Medicare cost growth reflected in the 2012, 2011, and 2010 Statements of Social Insurance, GAO was unable to express opinions on the 2012, 2011, and 2010 Statements of Social Insurance, as well as on the 2012 and 2011 Statements of Changes in Social Insurance Amounts. About $27.2 trillion, or 70.5 percent, of the reported total present value of future expenditures in excess of future revenue presented in the 2012 Statement of Social Insurance relates to Medicare programs reported in the Department of Health and Human Services' 2012 Statement of Social Insurance, which received a disclaimer of opinion. *Material weaknesses resulted in ineffective internal control over financial reporting for fiscal year 2012. *GAO's tests of compliance with selected provisions of laws and regulations for fiscal year 2012 were limited by the material weaknesses and other scope limitations discussed in the report. While significant progress has been made in improving federal financial management since the federal government began preparing consolidated financial statements 16 years ago, three major impediments continued to prevent GAO from rendering an opinion on the federal government's accrual-based consolidated financial statements over this period: (1) serious financial management problems at DOD that have prevented its financial statements from being auditable, (2) the federal government's inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government's ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements. In addition to the material weaknesses underlying these major impediments, GAO identified four other material weaknesses. These are the federal government's inability to (1) determine the full extent to which improper payments occur and reasonably assure that appropriate actions are taken to reduce improper payments, (2) identify and resolve information security control deficiencies and manage information security risks on an ongoing basis, (3) effectively manage its tax collection activities, and (4) effectively monitor and report loans receivable and loan guarantee liabilities.

The Ministry has improved its financial management since the Committee's last report in January 2011 (HC 574, ISBN 9780215556042). Many of the Ministry's processes have improved, including modelling and forecasting, but the Ministry has not achieved significant improvements in the delivery of key financial outcomes and therefore has much still to do. The most serious issue is the Ministry's inability to report its financial affairs on a timely and accurate basis. The Ministry's own resource accounts for 2010-11 were delivered late and there were significant problems with the accounts produced by two of its major arm's length bodies, the Legal Services Commission and HM Courts Service's Trust Statement. The Ministry faces significant accounting challenges for the 2011-12 financial year, due to the required earlier publication of the accounts. The Ministry needs to break the cycle of continuing failure to produce accurate and timely accounts. It also faces considerable challenges in meeting its tough spending review commitments, but without a full understanding of its costs, the Ministry risks unnecessarily cutting frontline services, which are critical to the poorest in the community, rather than ensuring savings are achieved through genuine efficiencies. Maximising the income it obtains will help the Ministry and fine collection is improving, but it is being outpaced by the growth in fines outstanding. Excellent financial management is critical to the Ministry's future success as it seeks to achieve significant efficiency gains while coping with workload pressures, such as increases in the prison population, that are largely outside its control.

?Financial Management Information Systems: 25 Years of World Bank Experience on What Works and What Doesn?t? was prepared as an updated and expanded version of the FMIS review report drafted in 2003, to highlight the achievements and challenges observed during the design and implementation of Bank funded FMIS projects since 1984.

We examine how the composition of public debt, broken down by currency, maturity, holder profile and marketability, has responded to major debt accumulation and consolidation episodes during 1900-2011. Covering thirteen advanced economies, we focus on debt structure shifts that occurred around the two World Wars and global economic downturns, and the subsequent debt consolidations. Notwithstanding data gaps, we are able to recover some broad common patterns. Episodes of large debt accumulation—essentially, large increases in debt supply— were typically absorbed by increases in short-term, foreign currency-denominated, and banking-system-held debt. However, this pattern did not hold during the debt build-ups starting in the 1980s and 1990s, which were compositionally skewed toward long-term local-currency debt. We attribute this change to higher structural demand for sovereign paper, linked to capital account liberalization in advanced economies, the emergence of a large contractual saving sector, and innovative sovereign debt products. With regard to debt consolidations, we find support for the financial repression-cum-inflation channel for post World War II debt reductions. However, the scope for a repeat of this strategy appears limited unless financial liberalization and globalization were materially rolled back or the current globally agreed monetary policy regime built around price stability abandoned. Neither are significant favorable structural demand shifts, as witnessed in the 1980s and 1990s, likely.