MODERNISING GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTING AND PROTECTING PUBLIC FINANCIAL DATA IN SIERRA LEONE: A STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK FOR DIGITAL GOVERNANCE AND FINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Sierra Leone presents a paradox that should trouble anyone who studies public financial management reforms in low-income countries. Two decades of sustained investment, five independent Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) assessments and three successive reform strategies have produced genuine achievements: a Treasury Single Account (TSA), an upgraded Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) covering thirty ministries, departments and agencies, adoption of Cash Basis International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), an operational electronic procurement platform and an ‘A’ rating for budget classification in the 2021 to 2022 PEFA assessment. Yet, in December 2025 the Financial Secretary warned publicly that fragmented data systems were bleeding value from payroll and pension administration, observing that “somebody will still continue to benefit from one system while the other system is losing”. This article takes that warning as its organising diagnosis. It argues that Sierra Leone has reached the limits of system-by-system modernisation and that the next generation of reform must treat three agendas as a single problem: interoperability across government financial systems, cyber-security and data protection for the financial information those systems generate, and institutional accountability for how that information is used. The article traces the reform trajectory from the Integrated Public Financial Management Reform Project (2008 to 2013) through the current interoperability roadmap, evaluates the emerging Data Protection and Right to Access Information Act and its unified dual-mandate authority, and analyses the persistent gap between transactional automation and data governance. It then proposes an integrated digital governance framework built on four pillars, digital infrastructure and systems integration, legal and regulatory enablement, institutional capacity and human capital, and oversight with citizen engagement, resting on a cross-cutting foundation of security and data protection by design, with a sequenced sixty-month implementation roadmap ‘costed’ against realistic institutional capacity and the financing envelope available from the IMF Extended Credit Facility, World Bank and African Development Bank operations. Sierra Leone’s experiment in fusing access to information and data protection within one authority, and in wiring anti-corruption oversight directly into digital PFM systems, offers lessons of genuine comparative significance for the Global South. JEL: M40, M41, M48, G00, H00