As the Nigerian government struggles to raise more money to cushion the impact of a crashing oil price, a federal regulator has confirmed how billions of naira that should have been paid to state coffers as internally generated revenues were hidden or diverted by government agencies.

Leading the pack of offenders, the Fiscal Responsibility Commission said, are the state-run oil company, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, and capital market regulator, Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC.

The two agencies, and many others, either lied about how much they generated, or how much was due to the government, according to exclusive details obtained by PREMIUM TIMES.

The extent of the fraud was so extensive and well worked out that agencies of government deliberately supplied contradictory information to different regulatory bodies — the finance ministry, Accountant General’s office, and the Fiscal Responsibility Commission – to mislead the government, and make it appear they were fulfilling their fiscal responsibilities.

The regulatory agencies too, failed to cooperate with each other to combat the violations, effectively helping the defaulting revenue generating agencies defraud the government for years, the Fiscal Responsibility Commission told PREMIUM TIMES.

The biggest culprit, the Fiscal Responsibility Commission said, has been the Ministry of Finance which has consistently refused to provide financial details requested by the fiscal commission concerning offices such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Fiscal Responsibility Commission said the finance ministry and the Budget Office of the Federation have frustrated efforts to ensure that respective revenue generating agencies remit to government the revenues they generate.

“(FRC) is finding it difficult to enforce compliance with the FRA. We have not been getting the kind of cooperation and support required from the Finance Ministry of Finance and the Budget Office towards the implementation of the budget according to set timelines,” said Charles Abana, the commission’s Head of Legal, Investigations and Enforcement Directorate.

The first flaw, according to Mr. Abana, is in respect of reports the constitution tasks government offices to send to the Fiscal Commission.

“After the approval of the medium term expenditure framework, MTEF, the law demands that MDAs and corporations should be sending reports on the implementation of the budget on a quarterly basis to the Commission for effective monitoring of compliance,” he said. “None of these have been happening. When we request from the ministry or Budget Office for budget performance, no response is received as they see the commission as meddlesome interlopers.”

SEC, NNPC subverting the law
According to the commission, one of the many illegal ways Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, hide and divert billions of naira they generate include using “creative accounting practice”, a scheme that has seen them delivering different financial statements to different supervisory authorities each year.

The commission said its investigation showed that that the financial statements submitted by some of the agencies to the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation, OAGF, and Minister of Finance/Budget Office of the Federation were often different from the ones submitted to it.

While the statements submitted to the OAGF and the Minister/ Budget Office would show the agencies as either profitable or breaking even, those sent to the Fiscal Responsibility Commission would show that they were operating at a loss.

“This practice is not only illegal and criminal, but also economic sabotage,” Mr. Abana said. “What these agencies are doing with the accounts to the Finance Ministry/Budget Office and OAGF is to show that they are delivering on their mandates, while their declaration of losses in the account to the FRC is to enable them avoid fulfilling their obligations by remitting their operating surpluses to government as required by law.”

The Fiscal Responsibility Act requires all revenue agencies to pay 80 percent of their annual surplus to the federal government.

Citing the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Abana said since 2007, the capital market regulator has neither submitted its audited final statements nor evidence of its establishment of a General Reserve Fund, and its payment of 80 per cent of its operational surplus to the government as required by law.

Similarly, the NNPC, the multibillion dollar government oil firm, has consistently refused to make its books open to the commission for scrutiny despite several requests as mandated by law.

But the case of SEC, the commission said, appears most troubling.

The Fiscal Responsibility Commission said following a letter it wrote to demand SEC’s audited financial statement for five years, the capital market regulator responded by submitting the 2007 and 2008 accounts, claiming to have recorded losses as a result of the global financial crisis that affected the capital market.

The SEC only admitted N800 million as surplus that year, the FRC said.

But the Fiscal Responsibility body said on a close review of the statements, it became clear that rather than incurring losses, SEC made about N11billlion as operating surplus for 2007.

That year, SEC said it paid 80 percent of N800 million, and not N11 billion it actually generated, to the government.
Even so, the Fiscal Commission said there was no evidence from SEC in the form of treasury receipt from the Accountant General’s office to confirm such payment.

A similar review of the 2008 audited statement of SEC, the FRC said, also revealed that despite recording over N14 billion as surplus, there was also no evidence with the OAGF that SEC paid 80 per cent (about N11.6 billion) that should have been remitted to the federal government that year.

“A computation of the total amount SEC has not remitted to the Federal Government as operating surplus was put at over N22 billion for the two years alone,” Mr. Abana said.

Apart from the two years, Mr. Abana said there was no other record of payment by SEC to the Consolidated Revenue Fund(the government’s central purse) since 2009, despite recent public statements that it made over N13billion as operating surplus for 2013 at a time it claimed its 2012/2013 financial records were not ready.

In July 2014, the Fiscal Revenue Commission said it wrote to remind SEC that it was yet to provide evidence that it had prepared and published its audited financial report from 2009 to 2013.

After a two-month delay, a three-man delegation representing the Director General of the capital market commission, Arunma Oteh, visited FRC in September 2014 to report that the statements were ready and would be submitted within a week.

The officials said they were not in a position to provide the documents, and that their mission was only to inform the Fiscal Responsibility Commission that Ms. Oteh would have wished to visit the office personally and explain things out, but for her trip outside the country.

They assured Ms. Oteh would visit immediately she returned.

“Till date the documents have not been brought. Their explanation was that the capital market was in crisis and that they were now trying to bounce back. Yet, till date they have not brought the financial records reflecting the impact of the crisis,” Mr. Abana told PREMIUM TIMES.
Ms. Oteh took over as the Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, in January 2010.

The disclosures by the Fiscal Responsibility Commission means Ms. Oteh took after her predecessor, Musa Al Faki, who led the capital market since 2004 without remitting appropriate rates of internally generated revenues to the government.

Mr. Al Faki failed to pay up to the federal government between 2007 and 2009 when he left office, while Ms. Oteh is responsible for similar violation from 2010 till date, according to details provided by Fiscal Responsibility Commission.

The commission’s emphasis is on 2007, the year fiscal responsibility law came into force.

Source : http://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/173341-exclusive-arumah-otehs-sec-nnpc-top-list-agencies-stealing-billions-federal-revenues-govt-report.html

SIGHS

Too bad

Front page tins. Any will be back latter after reading

What should I say ?.

I dey vex"!

ok

Story for the gods.

Mtchewwwwww.........meanwhile,J coles album making sense!!!!

Id1ots, now the economy is in shambles, their corrupt and cluless leader is there with his fedora hat, waving and smiling, what is expected of him? Nothing, cos the fisherman too is busy allocating billions to useless and un-necessary expenditures, moving two planes load of delegates all around the world with money that should be kept for the dry season, quite unfortunate! I detest everything about him, for a president to say that stealing is not corruption, it says it all.

See eh! We will borrow and borrow and borrow to fullfil obligations for the next one year, just watch!

Nonsense!

OK.

Thieves

Na today....all public sector na ole na since 1914 but some own na "kill at sight"

Five presidents in Nigeria , these
were his wife, Diezani, Oduah, Ngozi, Goodluck
Jonathan and that he was the weakest of the
five ,” Obasanjo wrote in 'My Watch '.

.

This is serious!
Anyway, "stealing is not corruption".

Owk

Hmmm










Ok

Sai buhari

A

ye7 naw

NOT SURPRISED

ibrutex:
E

E for Eediot

Some news doesnt make any difference from what the common man knows....who doesnt know every agency/parastatals steals....APC should look for other campaign strategies and not always blackmailing...tell us what u want to do come May 29

GEJ is corrupt and Buhari is a terrorist..welcome to Naija.

Chill, stealing is not Corruption.

And those two offices are headed by women. Toooo Bad , even Nigerian women can't be trusted

We all knew about how corrupt NNPC have being all this years.

Their record stink to the high heavens that the deregulation probe and subsidy probe were all smear with corruption and they couldn't defend their books.

That of SEC is one of the cardinal things that cause the share crash during the recession time when some companies where round tripping share prices to make the company share price looks inviting to the investors. I can still recollect when Zenith bank shares was quoted as 98.50naira..... Me it's just less than 20naira.

This are some of the corruption that goes in this sector and makes government loss alot of money.


Lastly, all this agencies are being run by women at the helms of affairs and these women are so powerful in the GEJ cabinet that OBJ have this to say:
They are the ones ruling this country and not the president himself

Heads of these agencies should be cooling yheir heads in kirikiri max prison if found guilty.




Outrageous nonsense

raziboi:
I dey vex"!

There is nothing we can do about it. After all, stealing is not corruption. So if u too vex,buy rope, u shld have a fan in ur house...do the needful