The Senate through its Committee on Public Accounts has resolved to probe the utilisation of over 1.7 trillion Service Wide Votes allocation in the 2017-2021 budgets disbursed to government agencies.
The Chairman of the Committee, Senator Matthew Urhogbide, who made this known during the meeting of the Committee said beneficiary government agencies need to give an explanation on how they utilised the fund.
He added that Service Wide Votes is a disbursement into the shortfall in capital and overheads.
According to him, a Service Wide Vote is more or less the country’s contingency fund in the annual budget.
“It is a huge sum of money which is kept for unforeseen expenditures. The recurrent expenditure part of the fund is what is actually referred to as the SWV, while the capital part of it is called Capital Supplementation. The SWV is domiciled in the Federal Ministry of Finance,” he said.
Senator Urhogbide also directed the Acting Accountant General of the Federation, Okolieaboh Sylva, who appeared before the Committee to submit details of the disbursement of Service Wide Votes as quickly as possible.
According to him, “We want you to submit details of disbursement of Service Wide Votes, let us have it as quickly as possible, please we want speed.
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“The other one that concerns you is the disbursement of Service Wide Votes from 2017-2021, you have not submitted the 2021 disbursement, let us have that of 2022 too as quickly as possible, the reason is because we have 797 agencies to deal with, we have decided to put them on hold until we get your report of 2021 among others.
“We need to input it into our report, let it be on record that you cooperate with us in this all important exercise; give us hard copies for our members to study.
“We have to take you first before any other agency, you will have to appear the first week of our resumption.”
Speaking further with journalists, he said the agencies need to explain how the Service Wide Votes collected have been spent adding that the Committee will need to know who authorised the disbursement of funds from Service Wide Votes, who applied for it, the authority to incur the expenditure and the supporting documents.
He said for the first time, the Senate is making inquisition into Service Wide Votes.
According to the chairman, his committee has made several attempts in the past years to ensure that heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) give an account of what they got from the Service Wide Votes but all efforts have been futile.
He also disclosed that the exercise will commence when the Senate resumes from its ongoing annual recess in September 20, 2022.
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Senate resolves to probe utilisation of service wide votes allocation of over 1.7 trillion from 2017-2021
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