Public Financial Management and Domestic Revenue Mobilization

Since 1970, we have helped countries improve public financial management and advance thought leadership on approaches to overcoming policy and institutional constraints to economic competitiveness, socioeconomic development, and poverty reduction. Our experience in a wide range of transformational environments provides us the necessary context to foster efficient and effective tax systems, results-driven budgeting, transparent and accountable public expenditure management, and robust macro-fiscal planning, optimizing public sector performance and contributing to broad-based, sustainable economic growth.

Under the Philippines Facilitating Public Investment (FPI) project, DAI assisted the Department of Budget Management (DBM) to modernize the Government’s procurement and accounting practices to lay the foundations for performance-informed budgeting. FPI helped develop and implement a strategy that built the capacity of the DBM to prepare the 2015 budget with a results-oriented perspective—starting with functional reviews of transport, agriculture, and health to improve planning, budgeting, and performance evaluation of these agencies.

In El Salvador, DAI helped the Ministry of Finance develop a state-of-the-art Integrated Financial Management Information System. The system will integrate and centralize financial management functions for the whole of government. The impact on efficiency, transparency, and accountability in the use of public funds will be dramatic by automating paper-based processes and creating a consolidated, virtual audit trail. This reform also supports and automates our support to the national adoption of International Public-Sector Accounting Standards.

Domestic Revenue Mobilization

DAI helps national and sub-national governments across the full range of domestic revenue generation levers—from policy analysis and enhancements, to administrative improvements in tax collections, data analytics, property registration, digital cadasters, collection of user fees for services, public-private partnerships, and more.

In El Salvador, DAI helped the government increase net tax revenue from 13.3 percent at the outset of assistance in 2005 to 18.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 2018, without increasing tax rates or substantial changes to the tax code. The project helped the Internal Revenue Directorate build a cloud-based data warehouse with detailed taxpayer profiles, returns history, and third-party data sources to conduct data mining that identifies taxpayers at high risk of non-compliance.

In Liberia, the Revenue Generation for Governance and Growth (RG3) project launched a mobile platform for payments for tax liability and non-tax fees for five agencies. RG3’s mobile platform reduced the cost of compliance and expenses for thousands of Liberians: Since the inception of the platform in April 2018, more than 40,000 payments have been made, totaling more than $5 million in revenue.