Minister of Finance Dr. Youssef Boutros Ghali has announced that  a General Services Authority has been set up to regulate stored goods and has initiated the process of disciplining service requirements and government purchases as a means of rationing spending.  Dr. Ghali has said the plan aims at developing management techniques and listing stored goods within the government’s administrative system as well as introducing a method for unifying purchase requirements for service and maintenance to which the government has allocated 15.5 billion pounds in the budget for the fiscal year 2006/2007, or 7.1% of total expenditure for the forthcoming year.
Dr. Ghali explained that the new plan is to find means to make use of non marketable goods through the exchange of products among government units.  The experiment has already been tried by 21 ministries last year and has led to a reduction in spending by 18% from allocated purchase funds for government requirements.  The program which aims at rationing costs will be adopted by all ministries and governorates  in an effort to coordinate prescriptions for all purchased brands and simultaneously deliver the merchandise through highly trained employees who will undertake the purchase schemes.  Centralized purchasing, once activated, will reduce spending through retail prices and simultaneously upgrade the quality of purchased amounts.
source: (Rose El-yousef)