Possibilities for Public Sector Management Improvement by the Digitalization of Financial Management and Control System in the Western Balkan Countries

Abstract

This paper investigated the opportunities for public sector improvement by digitalization Financial Management and Control (FMC) system in the Western Balkans (WB) countries. Optimizing business processes within public sector through the digitalization of the FMC system offers opportunities for public sector improvement. The idea is to analyze the existing legal solutions on FMC system in the WB countries and evaluate the current level of digitalization of the system to find the abilities for improvement FMC. The data obtained through an interview with management persons in the Ministry of Finance of the WB Countries and key experts who worked on behalf of the EU as expert consultants on EU-funded projects. Also, we use secondary data collected by exploring literature and OECD reports. Since the database is limited, we use descriptive statistics to analyze the data and the case-study method. The digitalization of the entire system presented only at the entity and state level in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The research showed that the development of a quality FMC system can be enabled by the digitalization of the entire system. The main contribution of this paper is its focus on digitalization of FMC system, since there is limited research paper on this subject.