Human beings are considered the best functioning systems in the universe, with an immune system to defend themselves from
bacteria, viruses, and other harmful pathogens and a lymphatic system to fight
infections. The perfect functioning of our biological systems keeps us healthy
to live our lives, and we have thoughts, feelings, and stored memories in“the brain” to generate our general perception of the world. While possessing
the best functioning system, we create our own self-written systems to regulate society, protect people, enforce rights, solve conflicts, and run the ruling administration. We make a system segregated by statutory obligations with an administration to serve as a government, a parliament to represent the people to monitor the administration and make laws, and an independent judiciary. We elect a government for the rulers to govern within the boundaries of the law. We believed that the expected efficiency
and effectiveness of the constitution allow the government to function to protect
the lives and liberties of citizens without violating the rights of the people. The system is established to govern the citizens by accepted rules rather than arbitrary decisions.
If the biological system encounters a malfunction, his/her life gets
complicated (depending on the scale of its failure). Similarly, if our
self-written procedures are not followed as agreed, we may mislay our society's civilized nature.
Public finance management is
considered the blood flow for the energetical public sector policy implementations in a public administration system. When citizenry pays tax to the state by expecting a return of quality public service and responsible financial management. They expect the governments to follow the statutory obligations on receiving, spending and accounting public money with a transparent and timely reporting mechanism defined in the law. Like most developing countries, the Maldives has a legal framework for public finance management (PFM), where each activity's timelines are defined. In this series of articles, we will highlight the legal
obligations and applications for essential activities of the PFM circle; Budgeting,
Executing, Reporting, and Auditing.
