By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas made virtually zero progress in improving its public sector management efficiency and performance over a five-year period to 2013, a newly-released Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report has revealed.

The document, obtained by Tribune Business, illustrates why the Government is so keen on its proposed National Development Plan (NDP), given that the IDB’s findings provide a damning indictment on the public sector’s institutional capacity to properly execute projects and deliver ‘value for money’.

For the IDB’s PRODEV Evaluation Tool (PET), which measures the capacity of government institutions to “manage their public sectors efficiently”, gave the Bahamas a 0.9 rating for the 2009-2013 period - well below the ‘optimal’ score of 5.

The Bahamas’ scores for four of the five categories in which it was assessed - results oriented planning; results-based budgeting; programme and project management; and monitoring and evaluation systems - remained the same in 2013 as they were in 2009.

In all four areas, the Bahamas achieved a score of less than 1. The only improvement came in public financial management, where the Bahamas’ score improved from 1.9 to 2.3, largely due to a narrowing in the gap between the ‘actual’ and May Budget narrowing from 15 per cent to 6.5 per cent.

“The Bahamas made slight progress on its management for development results implementation efforts,” the IDB report said with deft understatement. “However, compared to the situation in 2009, the other pillars did not show progress.”

The document acknowledged that the Bahamas had begun to work on its National Development Plan, the first phase of which - the ‘State of the Nation’ report - is due to be published early in the New Years.

“In the area of budgeting, no progress was seen in the construction of basic systems,” the IDB report added. “The country did not have a public investment system. Sectoral management showed greater development in the education and health sectors.

“No progress was made on the construction of a management monitoring and evaluation system; however, by the time this study ended, work had begun on designing a system to monitor and evaluate progress on public sector priorities.”

The IDB report, completed in late 2014 but not released until recently, found that there was no legal framework “to promote” effectiveness and efficiency in government spending in the Bahamas.

“Therefore, no system of performance indicators was designed, and there were no incentives for promoting management effectiveness,” the IDB said in assessing the Government’s ability to ‘budget for results’.

“As for the dissemination of budget information, both the proposed Budget and the Budget approved by Parliament were being published on the Internet. However, the audited budget implementation report was not.”

The Bahamas fared better on public financial management, the one weakness being the absence of an integrated financial management system.

“Information on the Budget, accounting, treasury, and public credit was kept independently. There was no public investment system and no electronic procurement system,” the IDB report, entitled ‘Building Effective Governments’, reads.

It added that there was no public investment system or organisation able to conduct pre-project evaluations of their likely returns, with the Ministry of Finance deciding on budget allocations for these works.

Analysing different sectors and ministries, the IDB report noted several common themes - no promotion of quality services; the absence of performance-based contracts; and no incentives to achieve the intended results.

In its assessment of public health, extremely relevant in the context of the proposed National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme, the IDB said the Ministry of Health had a strategic plan for the period 2010-2020.

Yet its strategies and actions were not tied to the objectives. “With regard to the management of services, the budget defined annual objectives, targets, and the offices responsible for achieving them,” the report said.

“No performance contracts were being signed, and there were no incentives to encourage the achievement of organisational results. There was no strategy to improve the quality of services.”

The same assessment applied largely to the Ministry of Education and its 10-year plan for the same period. And a more withering analysis was applied to the Ministry of Works and Urban Development, which read: “Not all of the Ministry’s programmes had targets. Performance contracts were not being signed, and there were no incentives to encourage the achievement of organisational results.

“No strategy for promoting quality of services had been formulated. There was no information system, and the Ministry’s report on management results was not being published on the Internet.”

The Government did get some credit for creating a planning unit in the Prime Minister’s Office, moving to improve procurement, and bring the Budget into line with international standards.

However, the IDB report said there had been no progress over a five-year period when it came to monitoring, with “no law requiring an evaluation of government management”.