Senate on Wednesday indicted Budget Office of the Federation for releasing N19 billion to four MDAs without the approval of Honorable Minister of Finance and asked for refund from the four unnamed MDAs.
Senate in October last year had commenced investigation into alleged illegal payment of N19billion to four unnamed federal agencies, by the Budget Office.
However after the investigation by the Senate Public Accounts Committee, the Budget Office was unable to present evidence of approval from the Ministry of Finance before it payed N19billion from the Service Wide Votes to the four unnamed federal agencies.
The Budget Office of the Federation in its response to the query claimed that it had written the Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation requesting for details about the four MDAs without response.
But, the Committee Chaired by Senator Matthew Uhroghide noted that the Budget Office did not present the letter it claimed to have written to the Office of the Auditor-General requesting for the said details.
However, due to the failure of the Budget Office to present approval for the payment of N19billion to the four MDAs, the Senate adopted the report of Senate Public Accounts Committee on the matter and asked that the amount be refunded to treasury.
The query is in the 2016 audit report of the Auditor General of the Federation which was submitted to Senate for consideration.
The query by the Auditor General reads, “Four MDAs were paid the sum of N19 billion from the Service Wide Votes without the approval of the Honorable Minister of Finance, some of the payments were made on a purported verbal directives from the Director-General.
“This act is against the Financial Regulation 301 and 302 which state that ‘recurrent expenditure is paid from the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) and no expenditure may be incurred except on the authority of a warrant issued by the Minister of Finance.
“In view of the above, it is difficult to accept the payment to the MDAs as proper and legitimate charges against the public funds.
“The Director General should provide evidence of approval from the Minister of Finance for these expenditures or recover the sum of N19billion from the benefiting MDAs.”