‘Need to rationalise govt spending’

KARACHI: There is a need to rationalise government expenditure and improve public sector services delivery and quality of results by making it transparent and based on outcomes that can be seen by the citizens, said. Asad Ali Shah, former president of ICAP, and senior partner Deloitte.

He was giving a keynote presentation at the Public Financial Management Conference, organised by the ICAP in collaboration with the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, (CIPFA).

Asad said that traditional budgeting is neither efficient nor responsive to citizens’ needs and expectations.

Resources are allocated on the basis of the amount of money to spend on each cost category, eg, materials, labour, overhead, etc.

Performance is measured by focusing on the inputs and expressed in monetary terms, without analysing the results achieved with those inputs.

He said that output-based budgeting aims at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of public expenditures by linking the funding of public sector organisations to the results they deliver.