Reforms within the framework of the consolidation of public finances and the rigorous monitoring of administration continues with the launch this Thursday, November 19, 2020, of the multi-stakeholder and multifunctional web application of the official missions (SEMO). The ceremony took place at the Yellow River room of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The SEMO platform, developed with technologies of latest generation is an application that provides better governance in the management of official missions. “The creation of the orders of mission is done by the data entry agent of the initiating structure. This action is not complete if no overlap is detected. Otherwise, the system prevents entry of the mission order while notifying the risk detected “, expressed the Director of Information Systems of the Ministry of the Economy and Finance, Alain Ahounou, technical arm of the setting up the system. He also said that SEMO is proven for over a year with a user support system ready to respond to the various concerns encountered in its operation. This is the Controller financier Éric Yetongnon who explained the real motivations behind the place of this tool. Major player in the validation of mission orders within the public administration, its structure sometimes notices unorthodox and contrary regulatory texts in force in the management of mission orders. Hence the instruction by the Minister of Economy and Finance, Romuald Wadagni, to set up SEMO to compensate for errors in public spending. ” This is a web application implemented in almost the entire public administration and which systematically detects overlapping missions and those fictitious. SEMO becomes the platform par excellence for publishing orders for mission whether external or internal “, he stressed.

In order to better control the implementation of the system and its appropriation by users, its deployment took place in three (03) phases namely: a pilot phase, that of experimentation and that of generalization. The pilot phase took place from May 24 to July 24, 2019, in three ministries namely: Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, the Ministry of Technical Secondary Education and Training Professional and the Ministry of Economy and Finance. He left followed the experimentation phase in all ministries from August 20, 2019 to August 31 December 2019 then that of generalization in all institutions and decentralized public administration structures at the level of all departments from January 02, 2020 to June 12, 2020. “This tool allowed since then, to detect several duplicate mission orders and by ricochet, to save enough for the State which could be estimated at billion CFA Francs “.

The Chief of Staff of the Ministry of the Economy and finance, Hermann Orou Takou, said that the government has planned in axis 3 of pillar 2 of its action program, strengthening the public finance management. This allowed the Ministry of Finance to undertake since 2016 a set of reforms within the framework of improving the quality of spending. “The supervisory system for official missions is thus added to the list of reforms undertaken by the Ministry of Economy and Finance in response to various cases of misappropriation of funds linked to official missions identified by the reports inspection “

Finally, he listed the objectives of SEMO which are: efficient management of public finances, security of agents and public resources, realization of an integrated benefit management system government officials and the inclusion of electronic or bank payment interior mission expenses.