Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Senator Matthew Urhoghide, reveals that the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation only deals with a fraction of Federal Minstries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) agencies. OSARETIN OSADEBAMWE brings excerpts of an interview with the OAGF:
What are the savings for the Federal Government by your committee since you began to probe the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) since 2015?
The committee does not really recover money for governments. We are only looking at annual reports that is sent to the National Assembly and same report is referred to the committee on Public Accounts in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. An example is what you see us do in the Senate; we look at these reports. Mind you, we have in excess of 707 agencies of the government: Ministries Departments and agencies, commissions’ foreign missions and so on. It is not all of them that were queried.
The one that are sent to us are the ones that are queried. If you look at our report, there are about a hundred agencies being queried every year or maximum query being sent out to 150 agencies. So, all others that are not queried are not brought into the committee. It is only the errant agencies that are so brought to us to look at as they failed to honour the auditor-general’s call that re queried.
When are you going to ask that money be refunded to the government?
When, of course, it is recommended that money be refunded is the time. We cannot say this is what we have got until the Senate says so. It will be premature to say this as a committee. That is why I cannot say this to you conclusively on refund. It is the Senate that will do so. I have not even attempted to see how much will come to government coffers in terms of prescriptions to the Office of the Auditor-general on the size of money recovered.It is Senate that will decide on that. After the Senate has decided, then we can say that this is what is expected from the public officers or agencies in this years that I mentioned, that is 2015 and onwards.
Are you suggesting the nation will be in the dark till you finish, when the media is awash with alleged infractions by the MDAs?
It is not in our nature to rush even though we understand the need for emergency and treat same when it comes up. There are things that we do as far as the auditor-general report is concerned. It is by the time we do performance audit which possibly has to do with capital projects. It will be another focus, where clients, companies, vendors that have rendered services to the Federal Government and through the various agencies, commissions, will now be X-rayed on the value the government on behalf of the people of Nigeria got for such services, either for consultancy or goods and other forms of contract.It is when we get to the point; when we have to do performance audit, for which case we do not need to rely on the auditor general’s report; we can equally do our own. So, some of those reports are ready and they are with us. When we get there, we will now decisively recommend that this company or that one has to refund a certain amount of money; we do not give value looking for the money paid going by the bills of quantity that was submitted.
Again, as a committee, we were able to do status inquiry over revenue and expenditure of any agency at any time. When we do that, it comes to the issue of revenue. ‘You collected revenue for government. Did you pay to the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) or not?’ That is why we always say pay back to the CRF when we noted infraction.So, this is what happens to those things. We cannot really quantify now in terms of naira and kobo, but as you know, what you think, eventually most of the agency and individuals who are accounting officers that just come to the realisation that ‘oh, we could be asked to come and account for the money spent.’Do you think that if the agencies knew that the letters sent to them by the accountant general’s office, they would be asked to present documents for audit? For example, by demanding them to bring these documents to substantiate those transactions, they probably would have taken the letters sent to them years back serious.So, the whole idea is to try to correct our processes and procedures in a transaction. We have noted that most of the MDAs rush to do appropriation. Nobody runs to meet up with financial auditing. You keep spending money that is not audited and you spend money and cover it. There is nowhere in the world that this happens.Right now, we have concluded the 2015 report. What we want to achieve with this committee is that every year,the financial audit report must be considered by the committee; submitted to the Senate to take a position and it can now send the report to the President for necessary action.
You are talking about excess 700 MDAs; yet you are dealing with a maximum of 150, according to you. How do you intend to work on the audit of the other agencies?
The other ones that are not mentioned in the report, we cannot go and query them, except if there is something about them; except if something comes to the mind you cannot deal with it. That is how these other agencies are; we ask the auditor-general to go and query them. Otherwise, we cannot do so.
Who makes the refund: the public organisation or the head of the office?
It is the accounting officer.
Let us be clear about this; the accounting officer is not the officer that probably took the money, why should he refund?
He is the accounting officer. Understand this: in the ministry, he is the Permanent Secretary. For an agency, it is the director general or the chief executives; they are the ones. That why they come with authorisation letters to stand in for them when they appear before the committee.
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