FG to audit all revenue-generating agencies

The Federal Government has ordered the audit of all revenue-generating agencies in the country in order to ensure that all funds collected are remitted into its coffer.

Finance Minister, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, who briefed State House correspondents after the first Federal Executive Council (FEC)’s meeting in the year chaired by President Muhammadu Buhari, also said that those agencies had been mandated to present their budgets for approval.

The minister also denied reports that the 2016 budget presented to the National Assembly by the president had been discreetly withdrawn for adjustment following public outcries against some sub heads considered bogus.

Adeosun, who addressed newsmen alongside her Information and National Orientation counterpart, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said the audit was meant to plug all loopholes in order to free funds for the implementation of the budget when passed.

She said: “The principal discussion in our meeting today was the initiative by this administration to plug revenue leakages in our Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) that generate revenue. The presentation to FEC was to remind ministers who supervise these revenue-generating boards of their responsibilities under the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA).

“Let me remind you that under FRA, these boards and corporations who generate poor revenue are supposed to generate and operating surplus , 80 percent of which is to be credited to the Consolidated Revenue Fund, but we have discovered that many agencies have never credited anything and never generated any operating surplus including some whose salaries, overheads, capital is paid by the federal government.

“In addition to that, they generate revenue which they spend without any form of control. So one of the big initiatives and changes of this administration is to bring all those agencies into line; to insist that they must submit a budget, that that budget must be subject to approval and they must operate within that budget so that the surplus that is meant to come to the federal government can be seen to be used as appropriate.

“So for clarification, let me just explain that in economies that are non-oil economies, these are the revenues of government. It was because we had oil in the past, nobody has ever really looked at MDAs, so many agencies, so many boards of government and they are many, in fact they are in their hundreds.”