he COVID-19 pandemic has challenged governments to provide essential services to their community, initiate efforts to fight the disease, pivot almost overnight to address the new challenges of employees working from home, and address staggering unemployment and economic hardships at the same time. As governments are now tasked with doing more, their own revenue is taking a huge hit from a reduced tax base creating grim budget scenarios, the difficulty of forecasting with extreme uncertainty, and the need to implement cutback measures to reduce expenses. Nowhere is that conflict more apparent than in procurement, where staff is left doing an almost impossible dance to both supply operations during an emergency and cut spending to meet a new budget reality.
GFOA’s Fiscal First Aid program lays out a 12-step process for recovering from financial distress. Included in this framework are strategies for recognizing, addressing, and reversing a pattern of financial decline. The strategies relate to all areas of finance, but facing this challenge is a team effort and requires collaboration and coordination across many disciplines, departments, and levels of the organization. This research paper addresses these Fiscal First Aid strategies from the perspective of the procurement officer and offers strategies for addressing the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic recession.
- Publication date: June 2020
- Author: Mike Mucha