The Senate has taken a swipe at the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL, the Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS, the Nigeria Police Force and 12 others for their persistent refusal to respond to queries raised against them in the 2019 audit report.
Expressing the anger of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts to journalist,s yesterday in Abuja, the Committee Chairman, Senator Ahmed Aliyu (SDP, Nasarawa West), explained that heads of the affected agencies refused to respond to queries raised against them in the 2019 audit report after several opportunities offered to do so.
According to him, going forward, any agency that fails to honour invitation to defend its itself will have its queries sustained and reported to Senate plenary by the committee.
He added that the attitude of the affected public agencies was frustrating and detrimental to aspirations and goals of President Bola Tinubu’s administration.
Wadada said apart from NNPCL, FIRS and the Police, other heads of agencies involved in the habit of not honouring committee’s invitations were office of the Accountant General of the Federation, Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office, Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (former DPR) and Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade & Investment.
Others are FCT Internal Revenue Service, Nigeria Immigration Service, Federal Ministry of Women Affairs, Ministry of Defence, Nigeria Communications Satellite Limited etc .
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He said: “It is worthy to state that the committee commenced the consideration of the audit report in October, 2023, with a view to presenting its report to plenary.
“However, some agencies have wilfully failed to honour invitations to defend their written responses to the audit queries as submitted to the committee secretariat.
“Beside the demand for submission of written responses to audit queries, part of the committee’s rules of engagement requires that accounting officers attend the committee’s public hearing to respond to questions arising from the analysis of their submissions which in turn, forms a basis for informed decision on the matter by the committee.
“The desire of the public accounts committee to timely discharge its constitutional and legislative function is by the evasive and negative actions of some CEOs or accounting officers of the concerned MDAs.
“The committee is very displeased with the attitude of foot-dragging by agencies, who are by law, expected to respond to parliamentary invitations and account for their actions.
“The committee has over time, extended invitations to those agencies, providing them ample opportunities to defend their queries but for reasons best known to them, these agencies have chosen to disregard invitations.
“It is on this note that we as a committee, have resolved that going forward, the Senate public accounts committee will go ahead to consider their audit queries as contained in the auditor-general’s annual report and any MDA that, henceforth, fails to honour invitations to respond and present its defense, the committee will adopt the position of the auditor.
“Also, this resolution would be added to our rules of engagement if MDAs fail to improve on their attendance to our invitations.”
