Compliance with public procurement regulations and its effect on financial management among public institutions in ghana: the case of fisheries commission

This present study aims to establish the compliance level of the procedures and guidelines of the Public Procurement Laws and its effect on financial management, as well as analyse the implementation challenges. The study would be helpful to public institutions in Ghana to create awareness and establish the compliance level among public institutions to which the Fisheries Commission belongs. It focuses on public procurement in public institutions using the Fisheries Commission as a case study. The study used a descriptive and exploratory research design. The population of the study comprised all employees of the Fisheries Commission who engage in the procurement of Goods, Services and Works. Fifteen (15) respondents were selected through the purposive sampling technique because there was a need to obtain appropriate responses from persons knowledgeable in the subject matter. The data was analysed with Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Microsoft Excel, and the results were presented in tables and charts. Unfortunately, the key limiting constraint to this study is the fact that there are limited resources in terms of funds and time, without which the study would have covered more public institutions. Determination of the level of compliance and its effect on financial management was by the Relative Importance Index (RII) method. At the same time, the Kendall Coefficient of Concordance tested the degree of agreement in ranking the challenges by respondents. The study results revealed that all the respondents have good knowledge about the public procurement legal and regulatory frameworks and documents, with the Standard Tender Documents being well-known. Overall, the Fisheries Commission's compliance level was high (67%) when measured by the criteria of the PPME Tool. Procurement processes recorded the highest level of compliance (76%). Though contract management was above average, on the other hand, it recorded the lowest level of compliance (61%). Furthermore, they showed that the area of financial management those respondents agree to be the most derived benefit from complying with public procurement policies and practices is transparency, which recorded a relative importance index of 80.2%. It was followed by value for money, budgetary, and expenditure controls, with each scoring relative importance index of 78.7%, 70.4% and 63.3%, respectively. Fourteen (14) procurement implementation challenges were identified from the literature and presented to respondents to select and rank the ones that affected them. The study showed that the most pressing challenge is delays in the payment of contractors and suppliers, with a mean rank of 1.8, and the least ranked challenge is that the "Threshold limit is too small for an entity like the Fisheries Commission in case of emergency" recorded a mean rank of 13.1. The study concluded that, notwithstanding challenges encountered in implementing procurement regulations, a high level of compliance was recorded. Key recommendations include procurement entities must adhere to section 43 of the Procurement Act fairly and transparently by adopting electronic procurement in the Public Sector; contractual agreements with contractors/suppliers should be honoured by effecting prompt payment upon completion of projects to foster speedy execution of subsequent assignments. For future research, the scope can be broadened to cover all public institutions in a cross sectional survey for meaningful generalisation.

Source: KNUST