Mohammed Shosanya
The House of Representatives’ Public Accounts Committee has chided the Nigeria Customs Service for its failure to submit audited statements for the 2016, 2017, and 2018 financial years to the Office of the Auditor General for the Federation.
This was sequel to the commencement of the public hearing on by the committee chaired by Bamidele Salam.
The Controller General of Customs, Bashir Adeniyi, who appeared with other officers of the service was questioned over the queries raised by the Auditor General to the Federation on the 2017 audited report.
The queries involved the “Under-remittance of revenue into the federation account for the year 2017 in sum of N62,242,980,006.87, discrepancies in reported revenue figures, resulting in under-remittance of revenue of sum N63,601,805,270.67, under-disclosure of outstanding remittance for the year 2016 to the sum N10,473,681.51, non-maintenance of bank statements and bank reconciliation statements, non-maintenance of revenue collectors receipt.
“Violation of e-payment policy of the Federal Government of the sum of N2,654,500.00 and non-submission of audited financial statements for 2016,2017 and 2018 financial years.”
Responding, Adeniyi noted that only Common External Tariff is remitted into the Federation account by the OAGF, while others that are active are remitted into the Non-Federation Account.
He agreed that there was an over remittance of N1,170,469,464.13 only, into the Federation Account, which showed that there was no under-remittance of N62,242,980,006.87.
According to him, since the inception of the Treasury Single Account, Area Commands do not maintain accounts with commercial banks, all revenue collected are remitted directly to the Central Bank of Nigeria and the statements are accessed at the customs headquarters through CBN’s Transaction Query System.
He said, “Since the introduction of repayment in 2009, the maintenance of treasury Book 6A for revenue collections was stopped. Rather, the repayment receipts on the Nigeria Integrated Customs Information System platform have replaced the treasury books 6A.
“The service does not have fuel and this necessitates the fuelling of the vehicles for operational purposes which cut across the four zonal headquarters and area commands across the nation for control purposes.
“The service submitted copies of audited financial statements and management reports for the three years under review”.
Documents submitted revealed to the Committee that the audited financial statements for 2016, 2017, and 2018 financial years were presented to the Auditor General for the Federation in 2021.
Committee members expressed displeasure with the non-submission of audited financial statements for the 2016, 2017 and 2018 financial years at the appropriate times.
The Chairman of the Committee ordered the Auditor General to present documents on other queries raised against the commission including “Splitting of contracts to circumvent tenders procedures to sum of N38,120,000.00, payment vouchers without prevent supporting document to sum of N22,396,768.00 and unretired cash advances in the sum of N12,431,199.63.”
The lawmakers agreed to allow NCS to come at a later date to respond to the queries.