A report on field attachment carried out at Mbale City Council

Abstract

The field attachment was conducted in Mbale city council, Mbale city in the period of two months. One of the main service offered by the local government entity include registration of business enterprise by the Uganda Registration Service Board, Uganda Revenue Authority and Uganda Investment Authority, community development work in terms of sensitization about the instant TIN guide, parish development model gathering and revenue collection. As an internee, I had to participate in all these critical activities. In the first week of arrival, the main activity was Orientation to the workplace and to fellow interns. This allowed me to understand the nature of the team members I had to work with but also fostered better cohesion. As the team members we became accustomed to accomplishing our assigned tasks for the week but also in conducting simple administrative duties and responsibilities. The main tasks assigned were attending every meetings held in the chamber, these entailed attending community stakeholder’s meetings and being able to listen, take note of different views and suggestions with resolutions agreed upon. Management information system integration was an area of active tasks where the internee forced to project some data in power point presentations like when registration of business takes place, I really learnt how to use the system. In terms of accountancy tasks revolved around source document filling in, transferring the information into the vote book, abstract and also analyzing how we were spending in regards to the votes and abstract. A key challenge that the internee encountered was the bad weather condition like much sunshine and heavy rainfall when conducting the field work. The limited presence of desktop computers was also a key challenge, in addition they were times when the pressure from school teachers was too much especially when distributing salaries. The recommendations to students doing internship should read about key aspects of government accounting prior to arriving, this will help them acclimatize to the records much faster, and to the university, in accordance, the lecturers who teach accounting there is need to train students also on how to prepare government accounts, abstract