As Senate pushes for audit
The Senate, yesterday, sought the comprehensive audit of accounts of top revenue generating agencies like Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Authority NIMASA), among others.
Senate’s Public Accounts Committee gave the charge while commenting on the 2021 budget for the Office of the Auditor General for the Federation.
It challenged acting Auditor-General of the Federation, Mr. Adolphus Aghughu, to focus more on financial transactions of big revenue generating agencies instead of beaming searchlight only on smaller organisations.
Chairman of the Committee, Mathew Urhoghide, who stated this frowned at the failure to audit the accounts of bigger agencies.
“You claim that you are auditing account of the federation and you won’t touch accounts of NNPC, NPA, NIMASA, among others. You will remove all the big spenders from your watch list, but will focus on smaller agencies. That is what has been happening from 2015 till date. We don’t want to be seeing these smaller agencies of government that you are focusing on because they can’t settle well. We are tired of seeing audit queries involving municipal councils leaving behind the big agencies.”
Urhoghide said his committee would carry out further work on what the AuGF was doing regarding the Bureau of Public Procurement.
“We are doing status enquiries on the Bureau of Public Procurement based on the Auditor General report. We want to expand the scope. We want to look at their revenues and expenditure profile. We will look at the budget, particularly the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). We want to see everything they have been collecting and how they’re spending it. We have asked the secretariat to write them and invite them. The indictment of the Auditor General is correct. They could not even defend the queries issued against them by the Auditor General.”
Urhoghide advised the AuGF to be proactive instead of waiting for corrupt activities to occur before taking action.
