Monrovia-July 31,2020: The Government of Liberia through the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, on Thursday July 30, 2020, launched the Electronic Document Management System (EDMS).
The System was necessitated by the persistent issuance of Disclaimer Opinions on the Government’s Consolidated Financial Statements due to among other things the lack of sufficient documentations to support the financial statements assertions.
The newly designed, enhanced and customized system will consider all aspects of GoL‘s business process and workflow while working directly with relevant stakeholders.
It will fully digitize all of the Government’s 107 entities. For example, through the usage of the newly designed EDMS, spending entities will be enabled to scan and upload all financial transactions to the MFDP over the fiber optic thus eliminating the need for a particular Ministry, Agency or Commission (MAC) to come over to the MFDP to follow-up on the status of any payment as finance officers would remain in their respective entities and track the movement of every transition online up to the preparation of checks.
Finance and Development Planning Minister Hon. Samuel D. Tweah, termed the launch of the EDMS as another day which shows the country is moving in the right direction and a giant step to digitization. ‘This is just another day to show that the country is moving in the right direction”.
According to Hon. Tweah, Public financial management under the leadership of President George Weah is undergoing a series of reforms, with some of the reforms being visible, while others like the EDMS were “quiet”.
“Quiet processes”, he says, were happening and it shows that the government is functioning in the capacity of institution branding, and with the fourth industrial revolution taking place around the world, and the whole business of delivering models in development and transaction needed to be changed. He noted that it was important for Liberia, to rebrand its development model, and not to copy that of others.
He emphasized that Liberia should leapfrog with regard to digitization, and plans were underway by the government to digitize the entire economy. Also, he said, it was necessary for the country to transition from a paper based economy to a cashless society, where a digital system will be used everywhere.
“We also want to digitize the entire economy, we want to have a cashless society, where people can use mobile money and electronic cards for transactions across the country”, Hon. Tweah said.
He indicated that the Ministry of Finance is working with the CBL and other institutions for electronic processing, and multi changes were happening across government. He pointed out that the launching of the new Aid Management process mean that all resources coming in the country will be structure in the way that it goes in the rightful area for development.
The EDMS was first introduced in 2016. In 2016, the Integrated Public Financial Management Reform Project (IPFMRP) hired the services of a local consulting firm, MWETANA Consulting & Technology Group to develop and install the Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) to deploy it in five of the largest Ministries and Agencies, namely: Health, Education, Foreign Affairs, Public Works, Finance and Development Planning, and the Ministry of States and Presidential Affairs to improve record management and storage.
The adaptation of the EDMS was also geared towards transitioning from paper (manual) to paperless (digital) thus avoiding the continuous disclaimers in GoL Audit process.