ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE AND MANAGEMENT ? ? monitoring, reporting and auditing, and oversight functions in fiscal operations; Promotion of effective public finance management; and The flow of resources between the central government and local governments, in the context of fiscal decentralisation. 93. Participants agree that public finance management is bedevilled by weaknesses in the ability to raise domestic revenue, low capacity in various aspects of public finance, and failure in implementing fiscal decentralisation. Inefficiencies in expenditure control, tracking and monitoring could be addressed without major capacity increases, for instance, by reducing the complexity of rules and procedures. Capacity constraints are generally felt to be particularly serious and need to be addressed soon. For example, qualified staff is needed, and management systems must be put in place utilising appropriate information technology. 94. Stakeholders outside the public sector feel that the authorities' satisfaction with their performance in raising external resources and managing public debt is justified. Virtually all other areas of public finance are seen to have weaknesses. It is, however, not clear to the CRM whether civil society and private sector stakeholders in general understand the nature or importance of certain problems in public finance management with which the government has been grappling. Such problems include improving the link between planning and budgeting; containing the public sector Wage Bill; dealing with weak expenditure control and tracking in general; and improving cash flow management in particular. 95. It was not possible to get independent coherent assessments of these problems from non-public sector stakeholders and of ways to ameliorate the situation. This might indicate that ways have not yet been found to educate civil society and the private sector at large about certain aspects of public finance management while encouraging broad debates on the issues. This goes beyond the traditional concern about transparency and borders on civic education, which is a major focus of some of the NGOs that participated in the discussions. These organisations have emphasised the value of civic education in helping citizens to monitor government performance in public finance management. 96. Given the information and technical deficiencies of the general public, the oversight role of Parliament in public finance becomes even more important. MPs agreed that their oversight role should go beyond the budgeting stage to include aspects of 73