The House of Representatives’ Committee on Public Accounts, on Monday, grilled the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Niyi Adebayo, alongside the heads of parastatals under the ministry over queries issued against them by the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation.
The queries bother on issues ranging from issuance of capital allowances to several companies without proper documentation, non-rendition of audited accounts, to expenditure from the Service Vide Vote from 2013 to date.
The Chairman of the committee, Oluwole Oke, noted that before the enactment of the Finance Act, only permanent secretaries were invited to answer such queries.
He said following the enactment of the Act, the committee extended invitations to ministers to answer audit queries.
Oke also decried that heads of agencies have refused to honour invitations by the committee to come and respond to the audit queries, pointing out that the government officials had consistently given one excuse or the other for their failure to honour such invitations.
He said, “We did not want to get to the level of issuing warrants of arrest on the heads of agencies. We felt that if we invite you and ask you to come with them, they will respect you and come. We were right; today, they are here with you.”
Oke added, “We want them to come and explain to the Nigerian people how they spent public resources at their disposal. Is that too much to ask? If the President will come to the parliament, why won’t his appointees? It is for accountability and transparency.
However, the minister appealed to the committee to give him and his team more time to fine-tune their documents and come back to them for the proper defence of the audit queries.
Adebayo stated that the issues raised in the queries were just being brought to his notice at the hearing, stressing that he would need time to sit with his officials and the Permanent Secretary and prepare a more comprehensive answer to the queries.
The documents presented before the committee showed that the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment had issued about 4,672 certificates of capital allowance worth about N7,865,186,245,398.81 to 2,203 companies between January 2017 and December 2021.
The documents also showed that within the same period, the ministry recorded what it described as disallowance (finding after an audit that a business or individual taxpayer was not entitled to a deduction or other tax benefit claimed on a tax return) of N101.553bn.
Capital allowance is the practice of allowing a taxpayer to get tax relief on capital expenditure by allowing it to be deducted against their annual taxable income.
