Assessment of Public Finance Management Practices in Local Government Councils in Enugu State

ABSTRACT

The assessed the finance management practices adopted by Local Government Councils in Enugu State. To the objective, four purposes were answered while three null hypotheses were tested at a 0.05 level of .

The study adopted a survey research design. The population of the study was 51 public finance managers made up of treasurers, cashiers, and internal auditors. In view of the relatively small size, the entire population was studied.

The instrument used for data collection was a 42-item structured questionnaire titled: Finance Management Practice Questionnaire (FMPQ). The instrument was face-validated by three experts in the Business Education unit of the Department of Vocational Teacher Education, University of Nigeria Nsukka.

To establish the reliability of the questionnaire, the Cronbach Alpha reliability technique was used and an overall coefficient of 0.77 was obtained for the entire instrument.

Data for the study were collected by the researcher with the help of three research assistants. All the 51 copies of the questionnaire administered were retrieved representing a 100% return rate.

Data collected were analyzed using mean to answer the research questions while t-test statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to test the null hypotheses at a 0.05 level of significance.

Based on the data analyzed, the study found that accounting staff in local governments in Enugu State adopted only 24 out of 42 identified fund management practices.

INTRODUCTION

Background of Study
Recently, the federal government gives a huge amount of money via budgetary allocation and subvention to local governments. The local government also gets its own internally generated revenue.

Despite all these, local governments perform below expectation with respect to the provision of basic amenities including electricity, pipe-borne water, hospital, etc to the grassroots people it serves.

The public sector, according to David  (2002), sometimes referred to as the state sector, is the part of a state that deals with production, delivery, and allocation of goods and services by and for the government or its citizens whether national, regional, or local/municipal.

The author affirmed that public sector activities range from delivering social security, administering urban planning, and organizing the national defense.

Adams (2005), defined the public sector as all organizations, which are not privately owned, or operated but, which are operated or established by the government on behalf of the public.

In the opinion of the author, the public sector consists of organizations where control lies in the hand of the  public1 as opposed to private owners,

and whose objectives involve the provision of services, where profit is not a primary objective. Udeh (2008), posited that the public sector engaged in providing services and in some cases, goods not by the direct wishes of the consumers but by the decision of the government bodies.

So far, it is obvious that the public sector is always engaged in one activity or the other; like the provision of goods or services or both. Therefore, the activities of the public sector can not be properly performed without adequate finance.

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