With so many complaints about the poor performance of Government Accounting and Budgeting System (GABS), Minister of Finance Peggy Serame has finally admitted that the system is excessively slow to the point that it fails to process the normal operational requests.
Serame, who was updating Parliament on Thursday said while statistics shows that GABS has been significantly functional for extended periods, from August 11, 2023 to date, the system experienced serious performance challenges. “The system became excessively slow to the point that it failed to process the normal operational requests, such as travel requests, creation of Government Purchase Order (GPO), processing of payment vouchers and general updating of the accounts payable modules. From the technical side, it showed that the system was consuming a lot of processing power (CPU) to the extent that users could barely transact. These challenges have adversely affected the execution of financial transactions especially payment to suppliers of goods and services as well as printing of annual tax certificates (ITW8),” Serame further told Parliament.
Serame indicated that her Ministry in collaboration with the Ministry of Communications, Knowledge and Technology have noted the challenges and are working around the clock to normalise the situation and find a permanent solution. She pointed out that in the interim they are implementing a controlled access plan by establishing a user roster, to ensure continued processing of receipt of revenue and payments to suppliers.
“Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) have been advised that they should in addition to the automated environment keep manual receipt books for use in case the system experiences functionality challenges,” she said. She also announced that the performance and reliability of any automated system depends on several factors, such as its configuration, the network (bandwidth) it runs on, the environment on which it is hosted (servers) and the hardware (computers) used to provide the service.
“GABS has overtime occasionally experienced some challenges of sub-optimal performance. To address these challenges, the Ministry in collaboration with the Ministry of Communications, Knowledge and Technology continuously upgraded and optimised the system as and when necessary. The last exercise to optimize and stabilize the system was completed in 2021 following the 2018 system upgrade. I wish to inform this House that since completion of the 2021 optimisation and stabilisation exercise, GABS has not experienced any major performance and/or reliability challenges,” she said.
Serame said despite the current challenges, GABS is regarded as one of the most robust and relatively successful public financial management systems in the continent.
