Perceived Fairness, Transparency and Efficiency of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) in Decentralised Public Financial Management: A Qualitative Study and Policy Implications for the South West Region of Cameroon.

Abstract

Purpose: This paper assesses how stakeholders in decentralised public financial management (PFM) perceive the fairness, transparency and efficiency of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) in the South-West Region of Cameroon, and it translates those perceptions into an actionable policy agenda for the Ministry of Finance (MINFI). It aims to determine what stakeholder perceptions imply for the legitimacy and operational success of centralised treasury reforms in sub-Saharan Africa in general, and in Cameroon in particular.
Design/Methodology/Approach: An embedded single-case qualitative design was used, with data analysed through qualitative content analysis to generate thematic categories validated by respondents’ quotations and supplemented by code-occurrence counts. Open-ended questionnaire, interview, and focus group data were collected from 44 purposively sampled stakeholders, comprising 23 finance officials, 1 executive mayor, 10 treasury and paymaster officials, and 10 contractors and suppliers who interact directly with municipal disbursement processes. To strengthen triangulation, the qualitative findings were brought into dialogue with objective administrative records: three voucher registers obtained from the accounting service of the Buea Regional Treasury, covering 560 individual disbursements totalling approximately 8.33 billion FCFA across fiscal years 2022–2024.
Findings: Three perceptual dimensions and one behavioural-response theme were obtained. Perceived efficiency emerged as the most heavily coded dimension, driven by payment and disbursement delay and by contractor withdrawal from public contracts. Perceived fairness was significantly compromised by the loss of councils’ direct access to their own funds and by inconsistent procedural treatment, while perceived transparency was undermined by multi-stage approval architectures and documentation requirements that obscured disbursement status. Triangulation with the voucher records confirms that the mean processing time across 560 disbursements was 124.6 days, with 62% of payments settled beyond 90 days, providing convergent validation for the qualitative perceptions of chronic delay, disbursement irregularity and liquidity-timing mismatch. The three perceptual dimensions were found to be mutually reinforcing rather than independent, translating into behavioural dispositions ranging from cooperation to informal workarounds.
Research Limitations: The qualitative case-study design supports analytical rather than statistical generalisation. The sample composition, weighted towards finance officials and treasury staff, and the reliance on contemporaneous note-taking and self-completed questionnaires for most responses, are acknowledged as limitations. The voucher records capture only the reception-to-payment segment of the disbursement chain and are therefore a lower bound on the total wait experienced by claimants.
Practical Implications: The study contributes a theoretically grounded framework, anchored in procedural-justice and legitimacy theory, for understanding perceptual dynamics in centralised treasury reform, and it derives an integrated, institutionally calibrated reform agenda for MINFI spanning approval-architecture reform, liquidity management, contractor protection, transparency infrastructure and stakeholder governance, sequenced against Cameroon’s PFM Reform Plan 2024–2027 and its IMF-supported programme commitments.
Originality/Value: The study offers one of the first qualitative analyses of stakeholder perceptions of TSA operations in Francophone Central Africa, extended by administrative triangulation with objective disbursement records, and extends procedural-justice and legitimacy-theory perspectives into the PFM context of a decentralised Central African setting.