Fiscal Rascality Index
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September 26, 2014
- Posted by: Center for Social Justice
REVIEW OF THE DRAFT FISCAL RASCALITY INDEX (FRI)
Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) with the support of the Open Society Initiative for West Africa has embarked on a project titled “Seizing the Momentum of Fiscal Governance Interventions.” The project’s goal is to contribute to the emergence of an accountable, transparent and value for money fiscal regime at the federal level and to ensure that clear public preferences are reflected in the operating and decision making processes at the federal level.
Part of the activities of the project is to develop a Fiscal Rascality Index (FRI) to measure the level of compliance by federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies to good and fit practices in fiscal governance. The indicators for sound and effective fiscal governance and public finance management regime have been established in law and practice at the national, regional and international levels. These include indicators for the pre-budget, approval, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and audit stages. A good number of the requirements are found in the Fiscal Responsibility and Public Procurement Acts, the Financial Instructions, Treasury Circulars, Civil Service Rules, Code of Conduct for Public Officers and the framework used in the earlier SEEDS benchmarking exercise, etc. At the international level, there is the IMF Code of Good Fiscal Practices, the PEFA Framework, Open Budget Index, Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, Sovereign Fiscal Responsibility Index, etc.
The project has started using these frameworks to construct a FRI which shows the level and extent of violations/compliance by key stakeholders of acceptable conduct enshrined in the extant laws and policies. The FRI will be used for civic engagement at Fiscal Governance Tribunals to be held later in the year across the geopolitical zones. It will also be used to assess federal MDAs and the result will be published after the end of the financial year. It will be widely disseminated and made the subject of media debates as an instrument to improve fiscal governance.
CSJ therefore invites you to review the Draft Fiscal Rascality Index which is sent as an attachment. We welcome your comments, critique, amendment, etc of the Draft FRI.
We look forward to working with you to make the FRI a veritable tool for the enhancement of fiscal transparency in Nigeria.
Sincerely
Eze Onyekpere Esq.
Lead Director
Here is Fiscal Rascality Index, click to download.
[ddownload id=”1868″]
I have had a quick look ta the FRI document, ad I must confess it’s such a great work. And I do commend the CSJ team for yet another pioneering work.
I am still studying the entire document in detail. I think the allocated weights to the sections are justifiable. However, at first glance, I think some work needs to be done on the quantitative balance and credibility of the indicators. Not doing this might leave a lot of room for discretion to the administrators of the tool. The two extremes of ‘YES’ or ‘NO’ may not be appropriate for most of the questions considering the likelihood of a wide range of responses typical of any non-purely scientific exercise like public finance management. This is especially important considering the very low and often widely varied level of capacity and transparency in MDAs at the Federal level.
For now, I think the FRI is a great initiative, and I will turn in a more comprehensive comment in the coming days.
Ikechukwu Okoli