Tamil Nadu’s finance department to delegate more autonomy to other departments on expenditure decision

The Tamil Nadu Finance department, which manages public finances of the state government, aims to delegate more autonomy to other departments on expenditure decisions while ensuring that accountability is substantially enhanced.

The department ensures effective utilisation of public money and plans to make the audit system more robust and effective, says the department’s Policy Note 2022-2023 presented by Finance Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan in the Assembly on Saturday.

The department’s vision is to ensure sustainability of fiscal health of the State through prudent fiscal management, with a broad prioritisation of sectors and initiatives. The department also adopts modern practices with technological interventions, to tackle the evolving challenges. The Department manages the macro elements of the annual budget in terms of aggregate level of receipts and expenditure. Within this framework, the department aims to delegate more autonomy to other departments, the Policy Note said.

On effective utilisation of public money, the department plans to strengthen the Integrated Financial and Human Resources Management System (IFHRMS) and Treasury System; tracking the fund flow to other departments and agencies; strengthening of the Audit System; adoption of modern budgetary practice; increase accountability and productivity; enhance efficiency of procurement processes, the Policy Note said.

New Asset Management System (AMS)

In the Budget Speech 2022-2023, it was also announced that to account for all movable and immovable assets of the Government and to monitor their utilisation, a new AMS will be introduced and integrated with the IFHRMS from the coming year. A Cloud-based AMS software has been developed by Tamil Nadu eGovernance Agency to optimise the resource utilisation by tracking the life cycle of all assets in government departments.

This software is being upgraded to allow departments to know accurately all the assets owned by them. This would, in turn, enable proper accounting, budgeting for maintenance ensuring longer life for the assets. The data collected would be fetched in the IFHRMS for accounting and better budgeting.

The departments of Public Department (in Secretariat), Revenue and Disaster Management, office of the DGP and Commercial Tax departments have uploaded their asset details using AMS software on pilot basis. The Finance department is also updating the asset details in the above software and also necessary instructions have been issued to the Heads of Departments under the control of the Finance Department to update the details through the Drawing and Disbursing Officer’s Drawing and Disbursing Officer’s concerned, the Policy Note said.

The Tamil Nadu Emerging Sector Seed Fund, which was established to invest in startups and other companies in emerging sectors, has obtained the SEBI approval for raising capital with a targeted corpus of Rs.500 crores.

The Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation Limited and TIDEL Park Limited have made commitments for Rs 30 crores and Rs 20 crores respectively, the Policy Note said.

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