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Capital Hill Cashgate Scandal or "Cashgate" is a financial scandal involving looting, theft and corruption that happened at Capitol Hill the seat of Government of Malawi. This happened under the leadership of President Joyce Banda, the first female head of state of the country. The scandal started when an Accounts Assistant in the Ministry of Environment, Victor Sithole, was found with huge amounts of money not in consistence with his monthly income. This was later compounded with the shooting of the Budget Director in the Ministry of Finance, Paul Mphwiyo, on Friday, 13 September 2013. Subsequent days led to a lot of civil servants being found with huge sums of money lacking proper documentation on how they got the money. A number of people in high-ranking positions in the ruling party were also linked to the looting. These people were suspected to have influenced some civil servants to pay them government money while having no contract with the government. These people were later found to have made "donations" to the ruling party of President Joyce Banda which led to calls for her to resign. President Banda herself had amassed more than 40billion Malawi kwacha (1.2 billion ZAR) in just 1.4 years of power and had resisted public pressure to declare her assets. == Background == Most governments of countries have Public Financial management (PFM) systems that they use to manage the flow of funds across various levels of government. These accounting systems enable a centralised and efficient management of government funds (generally income and expenditure) across departments and enable the money a government receives or spends to be reconciled with the actual funds in the government's bank accounts, countrywide. Due to the vast sums that pass through government bank accounts, it is important that PFM systems be robust and effective at managing government funds (be they raised from taxes, donors, dividends, etc.), detecting and resolving problems. In 1995 the government of Malawi began implementing a PFM known as an Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) backed by the World Bank. This was to replace the manual systems that were previously in place. If properly implemented and managed, the IFMIS system automatically links planned budget and actual cash budget demands, allowing managers to efficiently schedule expenditures to minimize cashflow problems and improve public service delivery. Thus, the main reasons for the IFMIS were efficient expenditure control, to provide timely budgeting and accurate financial information across government, to provide a state of the art computerised accounting system and to provide a standardised integrated financial management reporting system across government. A pilot project was launched in five ministries, but was met by many problems, resulting in the termination of the contract with the first supplier. Among the problems encountered during the pilot trial were severe mismanagement,technical problems, funding shortages, disagreements among members of the project (there were 3 distinct suppliers), insufficient training and staffing cultural challenges, resulting in long delays. By 2003, the world Bank was financing an IFMIS in Malawi sourced from the CODA Group, to be implemented by a South Africa-based reseller called UES. In 2004, Professor Lise Rakner, a Political scientist and senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Norway, the largest centre for development research in Scandinavia published a report in collaboration with researchers from the DFID and Institute of Policy Research and Analysis, titled ''The budget as theatre – the formal and informal institutional makings of the budget process in Malawi''. In that report, it was found that under Auditing expenditure "record keeping of transactions (for audit purposes) has been manual, but IFMIS project has opened for computerised records." Further, they found that "The proposed electronic system, IFMIS, is not being implemented. Resented for removing discretionary power to reallocate resources." Finally, the report found that in addition to ''Rampant fraud and corruption'' in procurements and disbursements, there were "no adequate records of staff and pensions and advances, leading to problems of ghost workers, especially in the education sector. Staff not paid and not motivated. Incomplete and doctored records: auditing not done." That same year, a Peer Review in November 2004 identified 21 issues that needed to be resolved for the IFMIS to work properly. For some reason, those issues could not be resolved. In May 2005, the Government decided to adopt and implement an EPICOR-based IFMIS following the study tour to Tanzania in March 2005, and a contract with Soft-Tech Consultants was signed in July 2005. In November 2005, the new IFMIS was formally introduced. All bank accounts in the commercial banks were closed and 8 bank accounts were opened at the Reserve Bank of Malawi. Cheques were produced and continue to be produced centrally by the Accountant General’s Department. Like before only five sites were used namely, Education, Agriculture, Health, Treasury and the Accountant General’s Department. By December 2005, one ministry was also connected to the central server in the Accountant General’s Department. By 2009, IFMIS was rolled out to District Councils, and by 2011, the IFMIS had been rolled out to all ministries and Departments except Region Offices and donor funded projects. However this rollout didn't proceed smoothly either. In 2006, an OECD report in the OECD Journal on Budgeting by Jack Diamond and Pokar Khemani titled ''Introducing Financial Management Information Systems in Developing Countries'' (that explored the merits of the IFMIS system and looked at case studies in developing countries) concluded (page 19 / 115 (last paragraph) ) that "In general, the implementation phase has not progressed well, primarily because of clearly limited involvement and some neglect of the system by the main players, including the Ministry of Finance, the Accountant General and pilot ministries. There are several significant issues to be addressed before the system can be made fully functional and rolled out." By 2009, President Bingu Wa Mutharika had ordered a review of the IFMIS, and a report was published in November 2009. Among the findings (according to a summary to the report by the Report's authors), were the following: The system does not have any alert system to detect any fraudulent activities or any deviations to normal operations within the system such as overriding system controls without appropriate approval process and any system performance issues let alone a functional audit trail to track system usage all of which suggests that not only was cheque fraud happening within government payment systems, but misappropriation within the IFMIS was easy if one had a username and password; collusion within various government departments in principle meant that a user could overspend and get the Reserve Bank of Malawi to honour it, even when in actual fact that money didn't exist. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Capital Hill Cashgate Scandal」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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