…Puts JAMB, TETFUND, NDLEA, on status enquiry

The House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts has summoned the Auditor General of the Federation and the Director General of the Bureau of Public Procurement over the seven years unaudited accounts of Nigeria Customs Service.

The committee headed by Rep. Oluwole Oke made the summon after Hameed Ali, the Comptroller General of Customs appeared before the committee during an investigative hearing.

The committee was investigating the deliberate and reckless refusal of non-treasury funded Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to render accounts between 2014 to 2018 to the Auditor General of the Federation.

Oke noted that customs from 2013-2019 has not been able to work through BPP is quite worrisome.

But Sadiq Ibrahim, who represented Ali, informed the lawmakers that the Bureau of Public Procurement gave so many terms and kept rejecting their submissions and this caused the delay.

He said: “You could recall at our first meeting with you Mr Chairman, we told you of our problems that lead to customs not having the audited accounts from 2014 till date.

” You directed us to give you evidence of the submission. Now we have the audited financial statements which we submitted. Even when the committee didn’t ask us to submit 2013.
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“When we went to auditor general we were asked to submit 2013 which we did. We have been having this problem of BPP.

Oke wondered why an agency like customs will be having difficulty to submit accounts.

He said: “If you, NNPC, FIRS are not working then where are we going to get money. The funds we are sharing between the three tiers of government is mostly generated from you, so if you do not have accounts then how can we do that.”

He said the law also made provision that in case Customs have problems ” you want to procure in an emergency situation go and procure and then come back and report to us.”

Aftee seeing the correspondence between Customs and BPP on the engagement of auditors, he directed the AGF, Director General of BPP to appear before committee saying: “We must find out the mischief, the reasons of frustrating customs, I have read the letter. The constitution is the supreme document so we need to correct them.”

Also, the committee has placed status enquiry on the Joint Admission Matriculation Board (JAMB) for failure to submit audited accounts to the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation on time.

Oke said that the institution violated the law and that the status enquiry will enable the committee to investigate and expose irregularities in the accounts.

Similarly, the Committee placed status enquiry on the Tertiary Education Trust Funds, TETFUND and the National Drug Laws Enforcement Agency, NDLEA for failure to submit audited account to the Office of the Auditor General of the Federation from 2014 till date.

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