The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), has said that public accounting must be properly carried out to save money and improve effectiveness in financial management, as part of measures for Nigeria to rapidly overcome the current recession, promote democratic principles and good governance.
The Lead Director of the centre, Eze Onyekpere, said this in Abuja during the presentation of the CSJ’s Audit Assessment Index (AAI), report 2020.
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According to him, the current recession the country is experiencing is a pointer to the many leakages in the financing and accounting processes which are crucial for entrenching transparency, accountability and probity in public spending by government and its agencies.
“Audit is a critical part of the public finance management cycle and contributes to its credibility and comprehensiveness among others. Although the AAI is an instrument for all time, there can be no better time to engage in the assessment and present same to the public than now that Nigeria has entered its second recession in five years and worst at a time more than quadruple whammy with increased national indebtedness,” Onyekpere said.
He said that many agencies are unwilling to open their accounting books due to lack of transparency in their operations.
Presenting the index ranking report, one of the CSJ experts, Fidelis Onyejegbu, said many government agencies have not been submitting their audit reports to the office of the Auditor General of the Federation (AuGF) in the last few years.
“The audit reports indicates that 160 agencies defaulted in submission of audited accounts for 2016, 265 defaulted in 2017 and 11 agencies have never submitted any financial statement since inception.
“The AAI is anchored on the fact that beyond the annual reports of the AuGF and the legislative hearings in the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), of the national assembly, audit is a closed idea that hardly attracts public attention, hence the need for an independent civil society intervention that recognises and pushes for good audit performance,” Onyejegbu said.
He said that since the return of civil rule in Nigeria, various fiscal policies have undergone reforms but the audit component has continued to stagnate and the Audit Reform Bills have not been signed into law by the President despite many efforts in that regard.
Meanwhile, the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology was adjudged the best performing ministry by the centre in terms of public finance management and openness to audit, scoring an overall 95.59 percent ratings.
Others topping the AAI best performance chart are the Federal Ministries of Environment with 90.63 percent; Transport, 89.21 percent; Labour and Employment, 86.94 percent and the Federal Ministry of Women’s Affairs, 82.16 percent respectively.
They each received awards of excellence.
Onyekpere said that the criteria used for the ranking are access to account books and records, extra budgetary and unauthorised expenditure, failure in revenue generation, public procurement and disposal infractions, unretired loans and advances, monetary value index and unauthorised deductions from federation account.
