As of 1999, Decree Law 192 of the Financial Administration of the State arises, where the Treasury system is implicit, below we will present the result of the efforts of the General Directorate of Treasury in the search for efficient mechanisms of budget control, starting from of the implementation of single accounts throughout the country and showing its particularities in the municipality of Colombia as an instrument to control the control of the state budget, where difficulties are evident from the beginning as well as its eradication with the implementation of this control in our country, so the generalization of this system to all entities of the territory and the country is evident.
The work that we will present below is the result of the efforts of the General Directorate of the Treasury and the Ministry of Finance and Prices, in the search for effective and efficient mechanisms, in the control of the state budget, based on an analysis in the execution of the budget in the Municipality of Colombia.
In April 1999, Decree Law 192 of the Financial Administration of the State arises, in this it is implicit:
- Tax System. "Budgetary" of Public Credit. "Government Accounting and" Treasury
This system was established on October 1, 2004 in the Municipality of Colombia, initially as a department of the Ministry of Finance and Prices of the Municipality and in October 2006, it was transferred to the Directorate of the National Tax Administration Office, with a single purpose to strengthen the financial discipline of the Budgeted Units.
Within the battle that our Revolution is waging is the strengthening of the activities of Education, Public Health, Sports, etc. and within this the priority to a group of activities for which the State increases its state budget.
Our investigation was given by the level of execution of the budget in the municipality and the improvement in financial discipline that has been achieved, this was carried out, establishing a comparison in the I Quarter of 2004, when there was no Single Account to process operations of cash of the budgeted units and the I Quarter of the years 2005 and 2006
In the First Quarter of 2004, different operational and organizational difficulties were detected, such as:
- Debts from previous years or aged accounts Absences of reconciliations Preparation of unbalanced payrolls with absence of signatures of responsible officials and other violations of internal control principles Absences of primary documents Absences of contracts.
In addition, the deficiencies in the order of accounting operations were significant, as such it was shown that:
- Gastronomic services of different products are paid, where only strong dishes are consumed (Annex 1) Refrigeration services are paid without specifying the magnitude of said service Services are received from gastronomic units, which have not been approved by the CAM for these. (Annex 2) Undue payments are made for products (bottled soft drinks) (Annex 3) Payments are made to entities at differentiated prices without being previously approved (Annex 4) Payments were made under the concept of firewood, without analyzing the capacity of the means of transport used (annex 5). In addition, the firing of firewood was paid at prices higher than those established. Agricultural products (vegetables) are unduly paid (annex 6).
Over the course of time, specifically 2 years, it was found that the problems have not been fully resolved, but it has been shown that these have decreased, thus managing to strengthen internal control, over the use of budgeted resources, immobility has been eliminated of idle financial resources of the budgeted units, payment quotas have been established as limits for budgetary expenditures, payment cycles to suppliers have been reduced, and accurate and timely information on the cash execution of the budget is available.
This is considered with the amount of documents that were received in our office and, in turn, were rejected, which indicate the level of knowledge reached by the Budget Unit of the territory (Annex 7).
Over the years it has been possible to verify that the Single Account constitutes one of the most important work instruments of these times, as it strengthens internal control over the use of budgetary resources, eliminates the immobility of idle financial resources of budgeted entities, increases financial discipline, avoids insufficient financial resources in the financing of priority activities, reduces payment cycles, serves as a filter to detect undue expenditures and at a certain time serves to provide accurate and timely information on execution of budget cash.
The existence of violations in 2004, in the use of the state budget and its elimination from 2005 and 2006, with the creation of the Unique Accounts, affirms that it is an effective and efficient control mechanism in the control of the state budget.. Therefore, it is necessary to generalize the treasury system to all entities in the territory as a tool for controlling their finances.
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