The Directorate of Stores and Inventory Management at the Ministry of Finance has on Monday 24th May 2021 kick Start the training of over 120 Personnel in various Ministries, Departments, and Agencies across the Country.
The event attracts stores and inventory officers or officers in charge of stores commenced at the Marianella Hall in Freetown and is expected to be rolled out across the country in the coming days.
According to Joseph Ngegba, Director of stores and inventory, this training is compounded on the use of store instruments including requisition, books, store issue vouchers, receipt vouchers, allocated store ledger among others.
He Continued that the expected outcome of the training is to capacitate the store officers in the execution of their duties, to avoid accountability issues, and also improve their report writing skills.
The Director further explained that the Directorate seeks to improve the country’s stores management system through robust capacity training of staff on store instruments which will be transformed from manual to digital.
He emphasized that Procurement accounts for about 75% of the country’s national budget and therefore, stores and inventory issues must be treated with utmost seriousness to improve transparency and accountability.
He admonished them on the ethical consideration in managing goods that would be accounted for and to always keep in mind not to trust people and to always verify and document requests.
He revealed that when he took over as a Director, he had conducted a nationwide assessment on personnel, stores facilities, and equipment in stores, based on such evaluation; they discovered that most of the people that were doing storekeeping were not trained and qualified as store personnel and the actual store instruments which they were supposed to use by law were not been observed; MDAs could not trace document due to poor inventory and many storage facilities were privately occupied by other people an issue which the directorate tends to retrieve.
He explained the changes made at the different MDAs, wherein the directorate has been able to bring these carders together including the storekeepers and store verifiers that are now called inventory officers.
The objective of the directorate he added, is to train inventory personnel, ensures that MDAs recruit competent staff.
One of the Facilitators, Joe L. Katta encourages the participant to register and become a member of the chartered institute of Logistics and transport in Sierra Leone to equipped them with inventory management techniques and help them in their various MDA’s.
He advised the participants to be cautious of corruption while discharging their duties, adding that ethics triggers corruption hence needs to be avoided in the execution of their duty.
He concluded that the establishment of the Directorate has led to the recruit of University graduates through the Ministry of Finance to manage the activities of the Directorate.
Deputy Financial Secretary in charge of administration at the Ministry of Finance Solomon Thomas encouraged to participate to treat the training with utmost seriousness, sighting that with effective records management from the stage of procurement to stores and the end-users, many of the issues in the suit report will be thing of the past.
He reiterated the ministry’s commitment to supporting the directorate to achieve its strategic objective which is also embedded in the Ministry’s strategic plan.
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