ECONOMIC OXYGEN, AGAIN

A vendor may now track where an invoice sits, but visibility does not pay wages, settle suppliers or keep a small business alive. When the same complaints return year after year, the question is no longer whether the system works, but whether anyone is measuring how long it takes to fail vendors.

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Brunei's Late-Payment Cycle Completes Another Round

Malai Hassan Othman  |  September 2026

In May, this column asked whether prompt payment could become part of Brunei's economic strength rather than remain an administrative footnote. Four months on, the honest answer is not yet: substantially the same grievance has since appeared twice more on the same pages, expressed in almost the same words.

Between 12 and 15 August, two opinion letters repeated what has become a familiar complaint. One writer, publishing as Concerned, described the Treasury Accounting and Financial Information System, or TAFIS 2.0, as swallowing a submitted invoice into silence — no confirmation of receipt, no indication of where it stood in the approval chain, nothing further until payment eventually arrived, or did not. A second writer, Seriously Concerned, made the sharper point that the delay usually begins before an invoice can even be uploaded: a Delivery Order, a Goods Receipt or a Service Entry Sheet may need sign-off inside a ministry or department before the Treasury Department ever sees the paperwork.

On 12 September, the Treasury Department responded in a letter titled “Transparency in Every Transaction.” It thanked both writers for raising their concerns and explained that timely payment is a shared responsibility involving vendors, requesting departments and the Treasury Department. It pointed to Government Vendor Portal features that let vendors track an invoice's status and respond to queries, and encouraged vendors to use them and keep their documentation complete.

Readers with longer memories will recognise the shape of that response, because it is not the first of its kind. In July 2024, responding to a contractor writing as Frustrated Contractor, the Treasury Department opened its first Payment Clinic and promised closer coordination between departments. By November, with complaints still coming in, the ministry was describing the same difficulties as ordinary teething problems in a system barely seven months old. In February 2025, responding to another wave of letters, it opened a Payment Unit Counter and again urged vendors to check their documentation. Lay the four replies side by side and swap their dates around, and it is not obvious a reader would notice: the language stays courteous, the explanations stay plausible, and the advice stays the same — submit correctly, follow the process, use the portal, and contact the department when problems arise.

None of this requires bad faith. Large payment systems are complicated, public officers work under real procedural constraints, and vendors do sometimes submit incomplete or inaccurate documents. But sincerity delivered on a loop, without a mechanism that changes the odds for the next vendor in the queue, stops being reassurance and starts being routine.

The central problem is not simply whether TAFIS 2.0 functions. It is whether responsibility can be identified at all when a payment stalls somewhere between delivery and disbursement. A vendor may have completed the work, supplied the goods, and already paid employees, transporters and subcontractors — and still find the invoice trapped somewhere before Treasury processing has even formally begun. Some vendors have also reported that issuing a purchase order does not necessarily protect the corresponding departmental allocation for the life of a contract; if that account is accurate, a supplier can fulfil a valid government order only to discover that payment must wait for a later budget cycle. That is more than an inconvenience. For smaller businesses, it restricts cash flow, delays wages and supplier settlements, raises borrowing costs, and erodes confidence in government procurement generally — and the consequences travel outward, since one delayed public-sector payment has a way of becoming several delayed private-sector ones.

This is why prompt payment is economic oxygen, not a courtesy: a business cannot run indefinitely on assurances while salaries, rent, financing and statutory obligations keep arriving on schedule regardless. The Government Vendor Portal may improve visibility, but tracking a delayed invoice is not the same as preventing one. What is still missing is a public measure of performance — average payment times by ministry and department, the share of invoices exceeding agreed periods, and the principal causes of delay where these can be identified. Publishing those figures would separate isolated documentation errors from persistent administrative bottlenecks, and would let improvement be demonstrated rather than repeatedly promised. Accountability need not begin with blame. It can begin with measurement.

The Treasury Department's latest response is reasonable, on its own terms. But a reasonable explanation delivered for a fourth time is no longer evidence that the problem is being managed — only that it is being explained well. If this column must return to the issue in 2027, it should not have to explain why the story sounds exactly like this one.

 

Malai Hassan Othman is a veteran Brunei journalist, columnist and policy adviser.

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