Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) – Containing leakage of funds in public spending

Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys (PETS) – Containing leakage of funds in public spending

Governments have to rely on the public money to meet all their expenses. Whether these are the costs incurred for constructing roads, building infrastructure, providing water, electricity, health facilities or providing safety
to the citizens, they have to bank on the money generated through various taxes. And since it is the public money the governments thrive on, the former has every right to hold the later accountable for appropriate use of their resources.

On part of governments, the financial resources are allotted with the promises of certain outputs, which may include improving citizens’ standards of living, reducing poverty and triggering growth of the private sector for greater
economic boost. However, the literature suggests that in reality this doestn happen as the link between public spending and economic growth or social development is weak and dubious. The contradiction points to a major problem, that is, the proportion of funds
allocated by the governments usually do not reach to the actual services providers.

Realizing the existence of this fact, the Public Expenditure Tracking Surveys or PETS are conducted to confirm whether there are leakages of funds and whether the actual funds are reaching to their intended beneficiaries. The PETS
– one of the social accountability tools, serve the purpose of curbing funds misappropriations in two ways. First, by detecting the origin and reasons of resources leakages, and second by intimidating the corrupts through disseminating the PETS results by
running mass media campaigns. This exercise culminates in ensuring appropriate use of public money, inculcating an increased sense of ownership in the society and generating public pressure that keeps the government officials from siphoning off the public
money.

Now a popular and well adopted exercise around the world, the PETS was first conducted by a group of researchers working for the World Bank in Uganda back in 1996. As expected, it did a significant job in highlighting and curbing
corruption in the education sector of the country. After observing success of the idea, it was eagerly adopted and implemented by the donor agencies, civil society organizations and the governments in over 35 countries worldwide.

After being evolved over time, the application of PETS is not confined to any particular sector; rather they have been used in a diverse range of sectors including health and education, energy and sanitation, agriculture and infrastructure.

For its application, just like other Social Accountability tools, PETS also rely on availability of relevant information, which may include facility characteristics of a service, financial flows, and outputs etc. Depending upon
the complexity of a mechanism or system where PETS are to be applied, the entire exercise to conduct them can vary from being a simple diagnostic tool to an empirical research on capture and cost-efficiency. However, with regard to the public expenditure reviews,
the focus of Public expenditure tracking surveys remain on service delivery only.

The first step to implement PETS is to have access to the basic relevant information on delivery of the public service under investigation. In absence of the crucial relevant information, a survey may only be able to facilitate
in quantitatively diagnosing problems of service delivery.

It is a well evident fact that information disclosure leads to a transparent and efficient way of overcoming systematic problems in service delivery. For instance, starting from Uganda, where first public expenditure survey was
conducted, the findings highlighted the financial embezzlements by the bureaucracy. Once the problem was identified, it was quite easy to uproot it. The government in Uganda instantly launched a multi tier information system with immediate complaint lodging
mechanism. This resulted in bringing over 60 per cent improvement in the transparency in education expenditure, and that too within three years.

Those aspiring to implement PETS in their own areas of work must remember that PETS could only succeed in the countries where governments agreed to provide an access to the citizens to the crucial information and facilitated the
dissemination of the findings through active involvement of media. Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that in the societies where access to information is not easier the PETS should not be conducted.

In the societies with weak public service delivery systems, like of ours here in Pakistan, implementation of PETS becomes further important. However, as mentioned above, in order to work out the idea, besides learning technical
basics of the concept, the researchers and the civil society organizations will have to start from sensitizing the government first. Otherwise, in a public delivery system that has rotten to the core, the very thought of implementing such social accountability
tool will not be possible.

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Posted by Fayyaz Yaseen on Mar 25 2012. Filed under Latest News, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry