The Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS) went live on 1 April 2006 in all line Ministries/Agencies/Offices (OMAs) after an initial pilot phase from 1 November 2005 in 4 OMAs, namely Finance, Agriculture, Defence and Office of the Auditor-General.

Modules

The IFMS comprises of modules from the standard Oracle Financials Applications 11i and a number of custom-developed modules all intergrated via the General Ledger. The standard Oracle Financials modules are: General Ledger, Purchase Orders, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Cash Management, Fixed Assets and the Applications Desktop Integrator (ADI) with which the budget is uploaded into Oracle from an Excel spreadsheet. The custom-developed modules are: Payroll, DSA (Daily Subsistence Allowance), Cheque Processing, Medical Aid, Housing Collateral, Debt Management and Helpdesk.

The Government Garage prints cheques via the Cheque Processing module on the IFMS and figures are fed into the General Ledger, but capturing still takes place on their own internal systems. IRD and Customs also interact with the IFMS via the IFMS General Ledger.

All line Ministries/Agencies/Offices are connected to the IFMS via VPN
(MPLS). Connections are established via terminal servers located at their premises. Client devices are a mixture of personal computers and thin client devices (terminals)

The Data Centre at MoF comprise of a server room hosting the IFMS 3-tier architecture, namely a main database server (SunFire E2900), an application server (Sun V880) and a storage area network. A test/development/backup server (Sun V880) also exist.

A Disaster Recovery Site is fully operational and realtime replication (Oracle Dataguard) is done.

The Ministry of Finance IT Division is entirely responsible for the maintenance, support and upgrading of the OMA’s infrastructure of the IFMS. Support is either rendered remotely or onsite. One IT support person per OMA was trained and is dedicated to render onsite first-line support to IFMS users.