What a file that never moves really costs.

A processing delay is recorded nowhere. It appears neither on the balance sheet, nor in the income statement, nor in an activity report. It has no line. That is precisely why it is never dealt with: what is not measured is not corrected.

Yet it is paid for. And it is paid for more dearly than most of the items that do have a line. It is one of the grounds of our advisory and organisation expertise.

The figure that should raise the alarm

The 2018 PEFA assessment of Chad — the international framework for measuring public financial management performance — records a fall in the budget execution rate: 87.8% in 2014, 68.2% in 2015, 44.9% in 2016. The report notes a deterioration against the previous assessment of 2009.

An execution rate of 44.9% means more than half of a voted budget is not spent. Part of that is down to the 2015 oil crisis and to cash flow. Another part is down to the expenditure chain itself: when an administration lacks the technical or organisational capacity to move a file along, the appropriation exists and the money does not leave.

This is not a problem of will. It is a problem of circuitry.

The funding that does not come back

A funder sets a date. The file must be submitted complete by that date. If it is not, the funding does not carry over to the next quarter: it goes elsewhere.

This is where the cost becomes visible, but too late. Nobody in the chain has committed an identifiable fault. Everyone handled the file « as soon as they had it ». The delay is the product of the circuit, not of negligence — which is why looking for someone to blame achieves nothing.

Chad ranked 182nd out of 190 in the Doing Business 2020 rankings, the last edition before the World Bank discontinued the programme in September 2021. That ranking had its flaws, widely documented. It did, however, say one thing nobody disputes: administrative delays are a factor of competitiveness, on a par with the cost of labour or access to energy.

This is not confined to the public sector

A private company experiences exactly the same mechanism. An invoice waiting for a signature, a purchase order stuck in a signature folder, a contract that goes back and forth three times for want of an approved template: the circuit produces the delay, and the delay produces the cost.

The difference is that the company sees it sooner — its customer says so.

Where to start again

You do not shorten a delay by asking everyone to go faster. You shorten it by looking at the circuit: how many steps, how many signatures, how many times the same document is re-keyed, and at exactly which point it waits longest.

That means measuring before reorganising. That is the point of an organisational audit: establishing the real transit time of a file, step by step, before touching anything.

For the National Malaria Control Programme, we took ten years of archives in hand and built a physical and digital system. The object was not to tidy up: a file you cannot find is a file that is not moving. Finding it is already processing it.