Country Financial Management

I am getting more serious in my financial management lately due to the huge spending needed to renovate and complete my house for the Home-Sweet-Home project

In addition to that, I noticed a lot of people are turning to unit trust and financial planning as their career choices. I think I know why - I strongly believe the country and all the people need better financial planning. This is proved by the recent increase of cases where people lost couples and hundreds of thousands to millions of their saving to some scams. Amazingly, at the country level, we are also noticing some overspending. Some of the spending left me with big question marks. I cannot seem to understand why the spending cannot be avoided or managed properly. I am still very inept in economy and financial management but I hope to learn more.

Here are the summary from the national news:

RM100 million were spent by the government for our 50th Merdeka anniversary celebrations this year.
RM 3.8 were spent per person considering we have population of 26 million people.
RM38 million were spent in 2006 on the same thing.
RM35 million were spent in 2005 on the same thing.

RM300,000 were spent by Malaysian Agriculture Research and Development Institute (Mardi) for overseas trips and non-project related expenses without approval.

RM 8 Billion was the increased amount in annual operation cost for the recent raise in salary for all civil servants. The salary raise was equivalent to
4 months bonus being paid out to each employees. ( I will be very happy if my company can pay me that kind of bonus)

RM100mil was sponsored by Russian for sending 2 Malaysians to space in return for the Malaysia's purchase of its military assets. Meaning the Russian is getting much more profit from the arrangement. Or should I say, Malaysia had spent much more on the military assets.

RM78,000 over 15 months were spent by Langkawi Development Board (Lada) to repair and maintain houses that were unsold under its public housing project
RM110,000 more are needed to rehabilitate and maintain the houses before the houses can be sold.
RM 32 million fell short of estimation for the project returns.


RM8.39 millions were the amount the Government paid more than the market price for the 13 items purchased.
RM1.24mil were paid more to one supplier than the other for identical engineering equipment
RM224.94 was the price paid to buy a set of screwdrivers valued at the market price of RM 32.80
RM10,700 was paid for a set of technical book valued at market price of RM417

RM154,200 was lost in July due to theft cases for Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd (SESB)
RM124,000 was lost in June
RM78,000 in August

RM290.12mil were spent to set up the department’s Customs Information System (CIS) from 1998 to 2004 but the system had not been used efficiently as the software is deemed not user-friendly. The software is still using DOS and not Windows.
RM340.27mil in tax arrears was not tracked efficiently because the earlier RM290.12mil software was not used properly.

50 to 80 cents per kilo was paid by Federal Agriculture Marketing Authority (Fama) to buy back oversupplied fruits . 40 sen to 50 cents per kilo is the current market price. So, even with the oversupply, the farmers could still earn MORE profits.

I really do love management in general because:
1. There are huge difference between managing greatly and managing poorly.
2. But no one really know how to measure it- are RM 4 too little amount to count?
3. Little can mean BIG - RM4 per person become 100 million in total.