Many government departments, in many countries continue to make senior financial appointments from policy stream officials. Including appointments into posts where, in business, it would be unthinkable that they should not be occupied by anything other than trained, qualified financial professionals. If policy officials feel they are being excluded from senior management roles, then the answer is surely to equip more of the people from that discipline with the necessary financial management skills and experience, before they are considered to be eligible to hold such posts.
Empowerment and roles
Ultimately financial managers can only make a positive impact on an organisation where they have been empowered and given the remit to do so. While some governments have genuinely brought their senior financial people into empowered executive management positions, in many government organisations, this has not been the case.
Not all organisations have their finance director on the board and many constrain their role to focus more on aspects of reporting than participating in organisational strategy and planning. Too often the finance director sits below board level and reports to a board member such as a Director General of Resources who has a wider remit and is often from a policy discipline background. Such approaches limit the ability of senior financial managers to use their skills effectively for the benefit of the organisation. It also sends out a message that finance is not part of strategic planning or decision making.
There is also a “Catch-22” effect here – because financial people in many government departments (especially smaller ones) are not trained and developed with the expectation they will participate in strategic management, they sometimes conform to the expectations that they are not equipped to do so. In their selection and development, they have not been chosen for their influencing and communications skills or given the wider organisational experienced needed to give them credibility and breadth. This can impact on remit or “organisational permissions”.
It is ultimately self-defeating for any organisation to exclude financial management expertise from any senior board or committee that involves the commitment of financial resources. This needs to be part of the constitution of all government bodies, that they ensure only personal with appropriate skills and experience hold posts with responsibility for financial management.
Skills for financial management roles
Ideally financial management skills should be incorporated into the early training of staff on accelerated development schemes who might at some stage of their careers be in a position to deploy and manage financial resources. Part of the remit for senior posts with financial management responsibilities should be demonstrable experience of the skills and aptitude for the role.
Giving some staff on accelerated development schemes the opportunity to train as professional accountants (as some governments do) is a good start. It helps to build a cadre of people with strong financial management skills who are likely to hold senior financial management roles in the future. Schemes of these nature usually only involve small numbers of people however, and financial management training of some sort needs to be made more prevalent. The answer may be a lower level qualification than a full professional qualification like Chartered Accountant. Perhaps something like the ICAEW Business and Finance Professional (BFP) which is less time intensive to acquire and could be obtained by a larger contingent.
Top level financial management
For financial management to be truly effective, resources need to be co-ordinated, prioritised and managed to deliver overall policy outcomes and manage risk effectively at the overall top level of government. In many countries this falls to either one of the finance or economics ministries (or a combination of the two).
However, once the overall budget is agreed, day to day financial management is very often conducted in the silos of individual departments. In the main, co-ordinating resources to deliver cross-cutting policy objectives – that might touch on multiple departments, such as improving health across the whole population or improving business investment are often hard to deliver in a co-ordinated way.
This is a tough issue to tackle, but ultimately there needs to be something like a group CFO function for government as a whole, empowered to undertake strategic financial management and the prioritisation of resources to outcomes within budget periods. This could sit in the Ministry of Finance or elsewhere within the top executive, but wherever it sits, it has to have the power to deploy a level of discretionary financial resources in accordance with the overall priorities set by the leader of the government. This might be made sufficiently easier if a pool of resources for discretionary spending (as opposed to the running costs) was held centrally and not all resources were allocated to spending departments.