The National Assembly management had, since September 29, 2015, submitted relevant documents in response to the queries raised by the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation (OAGF) on the N10.6 billion. The OAGF had, in the 2014 Audit report submitted to the Clerk of the National Assembly (CNA), Alhaji Salisu Maikasuwa, last Monday, alleged that the National Assembly bureaucracy did not retire the sum of N1,162,009,305 granted to 112 staff from recurrent votes and 50 staff from General Service Vote from July to December 2014 for various purposes.
The report also added that additional sum of N9,514,568,222.62 payments were made without raising payment vouchers at the management department, which violates financial regulation 601. But a top management of the National Assembly told New Telegraph on condition of anonymity that it was curious that the AGF’s query came up again months after the bureaucracy had responded.
He described the AGF’s annual audit report as a working document for the Public Accounts Committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, who will in turn invite all the parties concerned. He, however, expressed concerns on why the AGF failed to list the State House and other ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), which expend billions of taxpayers’ money on food items and kitchen utensils.
“Do you know that several overheads of the MDAs, which have about 150 staff, get several billions of naira as annual budgetary allocation while National Assembly, National Assembly Commission, National Institute of Legislative Studies and Public Complaint Commission only get N115 billion, with over 10,000 workers?
Yet no one bothered to query the expenditure of the MDAs,” the source said. He explained that it was customary for the AGF to raise queries and observations on issues while scrutinising the financial records of public institutions including the legislature.
“As you can see in these spiral-binded documents, the OAGF officials acknowledged receipt in relations to the same report being brandished without informing the public that it’s not an indicting report. “But with what is obtainable presently, it looks like someone is failing in his duties and hiding under the guise of exposing corruption.
Rather than portraying this institution in bad light, all those responsible for the audit should be guided in discharging their responsibilities. “The queries have been answered promptly. We explained that these documents required by the OAGF are bulky and since there are officers assigned to do this work, they should be diligent enough to have firsthand information by sighting the documents.
I think we have done our best in this regard. “On our part, we have cleared all the grey areas as contained in the acknowledged report dated September 29, 2015. The onus is on the AGF to prove otherwise,” the source noted.
While reacting to the AGF queries, a member of the House of Representatives’ committee on public accounts, Hon. Kehinde Odeneye (APCOgun), said the audit report “is not an indictment to the extent that they stole, but that they did not respond on time to the Auditor General’s queries.”
He, however, noted that the recent bill which seeks to grant the office of the Auditor General of the Federation the financial autonomy and first line charge, was to cure the “systematic problem which made MDAs to ignore the office of the Auditor General.”
