Capitol’s office rapped over ‘flawed’ asset management

By: Gerome Dalipe

THE current asset management system being used by the Iloilo Provincial Government contains “a number of flaws,” state auditors discovered.

This led to inaccurate and unreliable data in the physical count of property, plant and equipment done by the General Services Office (GSO), the Commission on Audit (COA) said in its annual report for 2018.

In fact, the unreconciled balance between the accounting ledger and Capitol’s physical count of its assets reached P390.250-million, the auditors said.

System of controls, policies and procedures were not established, the auditors said. Thus, the work plan for asset management and monitoring was not updated, which resulted in the inefficiency of reconciliation, redundancy of the work done by the GSO personnel.

The GSO purchased the Iloilo Provincial Asset Management Software (IPAMS) in September 2018 to help them consolidate, archive, and manage all of the Capitol’s assets and property.

But the GSO’s Property Division informed state auditors that the new system was not fully operational, thus cannot produce the needed physical count of property, plant and, equipment.

Likewise, asset information was not directly encoded in the software. They were just encoded in the excel worksheet then uploaded to the system.

They were also maintaining a separate excel file for the list of property which they update whenever there were additions or disposal of assets.

So instead of reducing work hours and increasing efficiency, additional cost was incurred because of the duplication and redundancy of tasks done by their personnel, the auditors noted.

Likewise, auditors also found out that the GSO work plan for the adaption of its new system management software was not carried out on time.

“Moreover, the subject work plan was not updated to reflect realistic timelines for extensions, specific outputs or deliverables of the assigned personnel or units in each activities, thus, accountability against the delayed implementation or underproductive personnel may not be imposed,” read COA report.

The auditors stressed the need for a concrete work plan with feasible targets and timelines to guide the office in the execution system installation and report production.

“Management needs accurate information for carrying out the operations since reliable information is used in making critical management decisions,” the auditors noted.

This will promote operational efficiency and prevent unnecessary duplication of effort to protect against waste of operations and discourage other types of inefficient use of resources.

Likewise, the auditors asked the Human Resource Management and Development Office to evaluate and review the qualifications of the applicants, particularly for the GSO staff.

“The HRMDO should not settle on what they hear about the applicant but also conduct a thorough evaluation of the disclosed trainings and experiences and validate the legitimacy of the same considering that the cost of the services was quite material,” the auditors said.