Introduction to Public Finance Management (iFIX)
Fiscal Information Exchange Platform
Vision
Enable governments to continuously improve their financial health, ensure a functioning and responsive service delivery system, and deploy available funds in ways that create an environment for businesses, communities, and individuals to prosper and stay healthy.
Overview
iFIX aims to provide real-time information on the financial health at the district or the state level in terms of expenditure, revenue as well as available funds. It aims to establish a connection between financial expenditure, physical progress and outcomes with the objective of identifying the returns obtained from public expenditure. The solution provides transparency and improves accountability while ensuring real-time access to the financial health of the government stakeholders.
iFIX helps address three core challenges with respect to the information on government fiscal programmes
- Generation of relevant information
- Ensuring the information generated is credible and reliable
- Facilitating the real-time or near-real-time exchange of fiscal information to all relevant stakeholders for data-driven and effective policymaking and policy implementation.
Goals
The key objective of the iFIX is to identify and resolve Public Financial Management issues like delays in funds flow, floating of unutilized funds, problems of low data fidelity, the administrative burden of implementation and outcome-oriented funding using the platform approach and associated policy reforms.
- 1.National Governments can use iFIX to exchange fiscal information about various national funded programs with state and local governments.
- 2.State Governments can use iFIX to exchange fiscal information about various national-funded and state-funded programs across various departments.
- 3.Local Governments can use iFIX to exchange fiscal information with various state and national departments.
Approach
Public financial management includes all phases of the budget cycle, including the preparation of the budget, internal control and audit, procurement, monitoring and reporting arrangements, and external audit. The broad objectives of public financial management are to achieve overall fiscal discipline, allocation of resources to priority needs, and efficient and effective allocation of public services.
Fiscal information exchange has followed the conventional route using point to point integration so far. iFIX enables any existing and future government agency to exchange information with each other through a standard fiscal information exchange bus.
Point to Point vs Bus Based Integration
iFIX is designed keeping in view the federal structure of governments. Each government agency can define what it can share with other agencies. The iFIX platform enables the real-time seamless exchange of this information through standards-based protocols.
Proposed Federated Architecture of iFIX Platform
Each iFIX instance follows the multi-tenant approach that enables multiple local systems to post standardized and anonymized micro-level fiscal data also known as Fiscal Events. Fiscal Events can be of type - Demand, Receipt, Bill, or Payment. Future release versions will include Budget events e.g. Sanctions, Appropriation, Allocation and Transfers. This will enable IFMS/PFMS systems to communicate seamlessly with downstream systems.
iFIX Platform Architecture
iFIX facilitates the exchange of fiscal information through a standard set of API (Application Program Interfaces) and events listed in the Standards section.
iFIX provides standard APIs for the management of master data like Departments, Funds, Charts of Accounts, Expenditures (e.g. Schemes, Non-Scheme) and Projects. Client systems can register into iFIX and based on the permissions granted, use the APIs to manage the master data and/or post-primary fiscal events e.g. Demand, Receipt, Bill, and Payment. iFIX then makes this information available through Standard API for aggregated and dis-aggregated forms for other systems to query and leverage.
Chain of Events
As events flow into iFIX, it enables the real-time correlation between multiple chains of events and provides visibility of the fiscal and cash position of various assets, projects and agencies that are critical in delivering reliable services to citizens.
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Last modified 9d ago