AP to roll out CFMS in Guntur, Chittoor on pilot basis

Hyderabad, Feb 4 (INN): As a step towards e-Governance, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu met with Finance Department Officials over the plan to implement Comprehensive Financial Management System (CFMS).

The CFMS aims to make payment of salaries, expenditure and budget management, disbursement of funds for public welfare schemes and works, debt information and accounts online. This will be implemented on a pilot basis in Guntur and Chitoor districts from this month.

In the remaining offices, it will be done in a phased manner by June 2015. The Chief Minister has given a nod to decentralize public finances management. This means there will be no 'drawing officers.' Currently, the state has 40,850 drawing officers, 280 HODs and establishment staff who are disbursing funds for 5.8 lakh employees and 2.3 lakh pensioners in the state.

The CFMS will rid the government officials of tedious work of manually sending bills to the treasury and waiting for 4-5 days to clear them. According to finance department, the CFMS also includes digitizing the employees' service register.

The CFMS also will help in better planning of the State's Budget by giving real-time information on the available finances and allot budget to sectors based on priority.

In districts, the Chief Minister suggested the appointment of a finance manager under the supervision of the collector. The finance manager will keep an eye on district finances and detect misappropriation of funds. For instance, if a contractor has been allotted work, video footage of the work will be recorded and his name registered, after which funds would be disbursed.

To train officials in handling the CFMS, employees will be imparted technological skills by experts from NIT and Deloitte. By next year second quarter, the entire system of payments and disbursements will be online.

Elaborating the benefits of the system, officials said that the CFMS will increase effectiveness of Public Finances Management, increase accountability of the government, integrate management of public finance, reduce third parties interface, increase substantial savings, update employee census accurately and most importantly, eliminate fraud.

The implementation of CFMS will ensure financial discipline, improve speed and efficiency of service delivery in G2G, G2B, G2E and G2C models and will be the single source of truth.

Stating that Andhra Pradesh would be the first state to implement a comprehensive ERP solution for public finances management, he said that the CFMS covers all aspects of 'e-Treasury Mission Mode Project '.

This will also include geo-referenced project management, trends analysis and also have a database of vendors, suppliers, beneficiaries, employees and pensioners through Web Portal/ citizen interface portal.

The CFMs which will be a highly secure system will be a risk-based adaptive authentication to validate the user authenticity and usage pattern, biometric authentication and digital signature for financial transactions, identity management and single sign on to all valid users, firewall systems, network forensics - monitoring and analysis of computer network traffic, audit trail at every level of transaction to identify users.

Principal Secretary (Finance) P.V. Ramesh, IT Advisor J. Satyanarayana, Principal Secretary (IT&C) B. Sreedhar and executives from NIT and Deloitte were present at the meeting.