Senate has vowed to sanction Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs of federal government that are involved in massive leakages and misuse of internally generated revenue (IGR). These agencies spend money they generated without appropriation by the National Assembly. Some of the heads of these agencies are said to divert internally generated revenue into private accounts from where the money is spent. In this way they avoid remitting their revenue surplus to the Treasury Single Account, TSA, and thus the federation account. The Committee on Finance said that this was uncovered during the ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Finance on IGR remittances by MDAs and 1 per cent Stamp Duty on all contracts by MDA. The Committee is fast tracking a public hearing for Tuesday on the Fiscal Responsibility Commission(FRC) Bill 2020.
Speaking at the Public Hearing of the Committee, Senator Adeola said that the Committee had unearthed sharp practices of non-remittances of revenues of government according the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) 2007 and the 1999 Constitution leading to directives for MDAs to refund hundreds of million in the last three months. In a statement yesterday by his Media Adviser, Kayode Odunaro, the Senator however frowned at the inability of Fiscal Responsibility Commission to enforce the FRA 2007 for government to have more revenue leaving agencies to frittered away government resources stressing that in this era of recurrent budget deficits government must get revenues from agencies it is funding, at times with borrowed funds. Adeola said, “Government can no longer continue to borrow money to fund MDAs and run huge recurrent budget deficits yearly while MDAs refused to remit or misuse generated revenues as stipulated by the laws of the land. Our investigations indicate legislative lacuna that must be quickly bridged as government requires these revenues to reduce borrowings to fund budgets.”
The Fiscal Responsibility Commission (Establishment, Etc) Bill 2020 slated for public hearing seeks to provide for prudent management of national resources on long term as well as secure greater accountability and transparency of fiscal operations within the Medium Term Fiscal Policy Framework among other goals to ensure credible expenditure management in government. The Senate Committee on Finance will also hear from the public on two other bills namely; the “Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (Establishment, Etc,) Act CAP N166 LFN 2004(Amendment) Bill, 2020” and “Constituency Projects Bills, 2019”. The former seeks to amend the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority Act 2004 to provide additional funding of the Sovereign Wealth Fund from the distribution of monthly revenue accruing to the Federation Account while the later bill seeks to make provision for Constituency Projects in annual budget by a minimum of 20% for the purpose of infrastructural development, wealth creation and fight poverty at the constituency level.
