Factors affecting financial accountability in Tanzanian local government authourities

Local government Authorities have the responsibility for social development and public service provision within their jurisdiction, facilitation of maintenance of law and order and issues of national importance such as education, health, water, roads and agriculture. Local government authorities collect roughly 5% of all public revenues and are responsible for about 20% of public spending. Therefore is very important to study factors affecting Financial Accountability in LGAs. The main objective of this study was to find factors that affect financial accountability, strategies in place to strengthen financial accountability in Tanzanian Local Government Authorities and investigate whether or not there is relationship between performance and compliance accountability. The study was conducted by a way of survey, three Local government Authorities were selected, which are Ilala, Bariadi and Kahama as representative sample and 38 respondents were interviewed by using questionnaires. The analysis was performed using statistical package for social science (SPSS) whereby comparisons and tabulations were obtained to help explain the results. The study revealed that various factors affect financial accountability, these are accounting information, the level of financial transparence, human skills (expertise) and financial resource. Others are the budgetary process, internal controls, contracting services (outsourcing), salaries level and morale of management, good governance, central government transfer to local government authorities, motivation scheme, political will, focused leadership and value for Money audit. It also found that combination of information dissemination, active community participation and consultation and oversight strategies in place to strengthen the level of compliance and performance accountability in LGAs. The results point to the need to introduce value for money audit and proper employee motivation scheme in LGAs. The results also point to the need of central government to fund all promised projects on time to improve local government financial accountability.