Auditor General to audit Ebola, flood funds soon

Speaking Monday night at the dinner organised to celebrate the National Honour of the Officer of the Federal Republic (OFR) conferred on him, Ukura said  the office has introduced many initiatives to add value on the traditional and regular audit processes.
He said among them is the performance management audit which traces the project claimed by the agencies and the ministries.
He said the introduction of these sets of audit is to ensure that public funds are well utilised and managed to the benefits of the generality of Nigerians.
“I always tell people that the regular audit we do, is just to express our opinion on the financial statement of governments, and these have been going on and on for years. But there are no changes, there is still corruption, all sort of things. In other countries, they have introduced performance audits which look at efficiency and effectiveness in the application of the resources.”
“The DMA in most cases when there is disaster, we don’t wait for due process. Government allocates monies to curb the disaster. For example, the recent Ebola outbreak and the flood that nearly took over our cities recently. We can’t start to advertise and issue tender before things are done. You must follow due process; no that is wrong, and disastrous.”
According to him, like the recent issues that happened – that of Ebola – government needed to take immediate action, adding “we will not say no, government advertise for this but government should take action, at the end of it, we will go and look at how all these monies were spent. Yes go ahead and spend the money but at the end of it we will verify.
“When these things happened, government released money for those things to be done. Then some people will decide to spend the money not for the purpose. So this DMA looks at what has happened.
“So what we are now planning is to commission this audit; yes go ahead and spend the money but we will audit how you applied it. These are the things we are introducing at the office of the Auditor General, to change how things are being done in Nigeria.
“You go around the country, you will see a lot of abandoned projects. Through performance we will find out what went wrong and how to address the situation in the future,” he said.