Samburu spending more on salaries and allowances
Samburu Governor Moses Kasaine Lenolkulal. His government spent more on salaries, wages and allowances
Samburu County is increasingly spending more of its total allocations on salaries, wages, allowances and other employee benefits, a new report by the Controller of Budget shows.
The report released recently shows that the amount Samburu spent on salaries and other personal emoluments was almost thrice what it spent on development during the first nine months of the 2021/2022 financial year.
While, the recommended ceiling for personal emoluments in the 2015 Regulation 25 (1) (b) of the Public Finance Management (County Governments) Regulations is 35 percent, the report shows Samburu exceeded to 37 percent.
According to the report by Margret Nyakang'o, Samburu spent a whooping Sh1.7 billion on recurrent expenditure in the first nine months in 2021/2022, while spending only Sh604.05 million on development programmes.
"The wage bill of Sh1.77 billion includes Sh656.64 million attributable to the health sector, which translates to 37.1 percent of the total wage bill in the reporting period," the report says.
Ms Nyakang’o also faulted the Moses Lenolkulal administration for processing Sh255 million worth of salaries manually, contrary to the law, raising concerns about oversight pitfalls. The manual payroll amounted to 15.9 percent of the total personal emoluments, according to the report.
Ms Nyakang’o said the manual payments are in contravention of the law, which requires county governments to use the prescribed Integrated Payroll Personnel Database (IPPD), which is not prone to abuse.
"Personnel emoluments amounting to Sh1.35 billion were processed through the IPPD system, while those paid through the manual payroll were Sh255.17 million. The government policy is that salaries should be processed through the IPPD system, and the county is advised to fast-track the acquisition of personal numbers for their staff," Ms Nyakang'o said in the report.
The IPPD system streamlines the payroll from duplications and other inefficiencies commonly found in manual management of the payroll.
Samburu spent Sh18.48 million on committee sitting allowances for 28 MCAs and Speaker against the annual budget allocation of Sh26.40 million. The report indicates that the average monthly sitting allowance was Sh73,320 per MCA against the Salaries and Remuneration Commission (SRC) recommended monthly ceiling of Sh124,800.
During the period under review, expenditure on domestic travel amounted to Sh150.23 million and comprised Sh55.22 million spent by the county assembly and Sh95 million by the county executive.
According to the report, the spending on foreign travel cost Sh15.36 million and consisted of Sh9.59 million by the county assembly and Sh5.78 million by the county executive.
Ms Nyakang'o’s analysis of expenditure by departments show that Education and Vocational Training had the highest percentage of recurrent expenditure (88.5 percent), while Roads, Transport and Public Works had the lowest (31.4 per cent).
Tourism, Trade, Enterprise Development and Cooperatives recorded the highest absorption rate of the development budget at 70.8 percent, while the county assembly, county executive and the department of Lands, Housing, Physical Planning & Urban Development did not report any expenditure on development activities.
Ms Nyakang'o observed that low absorption of development funds as indicated by the expenditure of Sh604.05 million hampered effective budget implementation. The development expenditure represented 21.4 percent of the annual development budget.
Other challenges that she noted hampered budget implementation included underperformance of own-source revenue at Sh85.38 million against an annual projection of Sh150 million, representing 56.9 percent of the annual target.
