Reps threaten to withhold allocations of MDAs

The House of Representatives has threatened to withhold allocations of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) that refused to remit excess, unspent funds contained in their budgets over the years.

Chairman, House Committee on Public Accounts, Wole Oke disclosed this on Monday at the resumed investigative hearing of MDAs non remittance based on Audit Queries from the Office of the Auditor General of Nigeria.

He added that, the Constitution has clearly created a workable tripod system for checks and balances through the roles it has assigned to the MDAs to conduct a self – audit, while the Auditor General is required to receive the Reports and conduct checks on some category of statutory bodies and the National Assembly is required to consider the Reports.

“Despite this workable tripod system for checks and balances, key stakeholders have succeeded in frustrating its smooth operations. The danger is that if nothing is done to fix this problem, it will create an incentive for MDAs to become reckless and non-accountable to any oversighting authority.

“Without doubts, the tripod system for checks and balance has not been allowed to work since the enactment of the 1999 Constitution. I partly blame this on the failure of the Constitution to prescribe a clear penalty for non – compliance with this provision.

“In such an instance of obvious gap in the law, the National Assembly will be left with no option than to exercise its power of appropriation to allocate nil funds to such MDAs for their failure to account for funds released to them,” he warned.