Hello and welcome to this month’s newsletter. I hope you are safe and well, wherever you are in the world.

What have I been doing since the last newsletter?

I completed my online teaching of public sector financial management at the University of Nottingham and I got some nice feedback from the students, including:

Gary has brought engaging and valuable content that is really relevant to my own area of work.

I've really enjoyed this module and have learnt so much! I'm not great with numbers/math but it has been really accessible and interesting. I also like that Gary uses examples and material from all over the world not just the UK.

Now all I have to do is mark 60 or so essay at the end of this month!

I also dropped into course at Utrecht University for an hour to answer questions from students who are using my book as one of the set texts for their class. I hope to have news about a book project in the next month or two.

We have completed the 2021 update of ACCA’s Certificate in IPSAS course in terms of content. There are still several steps for others to complete, including translation into other languages, so it will be a couple of months before it goes live and replaces the 2020 version.

Online courses

Over the new year holiday I did some work on my business plan for 2021. This includes developing more online courses to go with the ones which are already available, some of them for free, here. Check them out!

Public financial management in the news

Here are some of the articles I have spotted in the last few weeks.

Public procurement is one of my areas of knowledge. Here in the UK our public procurement law is based on procurement directives agreed by the European Commission, as part of the mechanism that ensures there is a single market across the whole of the European Union. the UK is no longer part of the EU and last month published a green paper, Transforming Public Procurement, intended “to speed up and simplify procurement processes, place value for money at their heart, and unleash opportunities for small businesses, charities and social enterprises to innovate in public service delivery.” As this is a green paper, it is a consultation document. There are 42 questions in the document and any interested person or institution could respond. See the document for details.

Also on the subject of procurement, ACCA published New Models of Public Procurement: A Tool for Sustainable Recovery at their online public sector conference on 4 December. The report makes recommendations for improvement in four categories:

  • Eliminating bribery and corruption
  • Improving the buyer-supplier relationship and promoting competition
  • Modernising and refocusing procurement to meet the challenges of a post-Covid-19 world
  • Public procurement as a tool in the Covid-19 recovery. Download the report here to find out more.

Here is a blog post by the IMF about delivery of its first anti-corruption training course on “Fighting Corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa” during last November.

And keeping with the idea of training, the IMF has published 20 or so free online courses covering a wide range of subject. They include public financial management but also macroeconomics, forecasting, debt sustainability and statistics. Some of the courses are in languages other than English. You can see all the courses here.

Finally, a couple of tax stories relating to the pandemic. First, Argentina plans to levy a tax on its super-rich to help pay for the pandemic. Secondly, here in the UK the supermarket chain Tesco, followed by others, repaid £585 million of tax relief it had received from the government grants to the Treasury because they believe such public money should go to other businesses and communities who need it more. The press release is here.