Supply chain management - Essay Example

The flow chart above describes the processes involved in the finance ministry when undertaking budget allocation and control. It indicates the channel followed in the reception of budget orders from different ministries and their settlement. It is the ultimate goal of every government department to efficiently perform its core duties. Once a given ministry, deliberates on budgetary requests an order request is sent to the ministry of finance. As indicated in the flow chart, the request of payment is received and registered in the receipts book for recording purposes.

This is the first step in the elimination of fraud which emanates from dubious and illegitimate payments (Coe 2007, pg. 206).After, registration of the request, a thorough scrutiny is done to the document to establish its authenticity and note any errors. The calculations and values indicated under the document are vetted to ensure their correctness and omit possible errors. More over, this step is necessary to detect overvaluations and unnecessary items. If the document fails the check list, it should be retained for further action (Coe 2007, pg. 208).Remarkably, on meeting the laid down procedures and requirements, the request is acted upon by raising the requested ministry budget.

This is important to enable the concerned ministry to meet its responsibilities. Allegedly, the finance ministry may be forced to suspend the request until the next financial year budget. Notably, this will not be undertaken, purportedly to avert the instances of the ministries failing to meet their obligations. As requested, funds are channeled through to requesting ministry as per items in order of their priority and time limits (Coe 2007, pg. 208).More over, the ministry of finance supply chain officials conducts an audit on the previous allocations to the concerned ministry to establish their spending.

This is also in endeavor to ascertain whether the ministry, did under spend and establish the balance they retained in the current financial year. In the event, the ministry fails to even meet the set criteria; there is no sending of the request to the budget department for more scrutiny (Coe 2007, pg. 208).Finally, the supply chain specialists issues the requested checks as per the detailed items to the ministry which now is at liberty to spend the funds efficiently. Notably, from the above flow chart, some discrepancies are emerging indicating the weakness of the model.

As indicated, after checking the request order, it is not returned back to the requesting ministry. This raises an issue with he failure of he request to meet the established procedures and instances of overvaluation, errors and omissions. As a matter of fact, the documents should be returned back to the ministry to avoid fraud and mismanagement of public funds. On raising the ministry budget will lead to budgetary constraints which result to high budget deficits. Further more, this may force the budget specialists to under fund crucial items from other ministries.

In the occurrence of additional request, the ministry of finance should push the request to the next budget year (Coe 2007, pg. 210).Significantly, there is also a problem of failing to submit the request to the budget department. This is the department entitled with the stringent allocation and balancing of the budget apportioned to the ministries. Failure to submit the request to the department will result in payment of unbudgeted items. To avoid such an instance, the request must be passed to the budget department for more scrutiny and consideration.

In addition, on auditing and checking the financial balances, the request should not be affected if the ministry retained a large balance in the ending year budget (Coe 2007, pg. 210).Suggestively, this supply chain can attain efficiency if several measures are put in place. For an effective performance, order requests must be directed through the budget department for consideration. Under here, the department must conduct a serious audit of the request and the ministry’s spending in the ending year to verify its qualification for more funding.

ReferencesCoe Charles. Governmental And Nonprofit Financial Management. New York, Management Concepts, 2007