As the economy continues to struggle with dwindling oil revenue, the Federal Government in its determination to make the country work has set out to build a new culture of fiscal discipline that it hopes will plug all leakages that defined government business in the past.
The government says it is under no illusion that these are troubled times for the economy and that it is not going to get out of the situation any time soon, more so as the price of oil, which accounts for over 70 percent of national revenues, has fallen from a high of $116 in June 2014 to barely $30, as at date.
In addition to the anti-corruption crusade of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, the government has decided, through the Ministry of Finance, to cut waste and expand revenues, especially non-oil revenues, and power the capacity of the government to deliver on the many campaign promises among which are fixing power, infrastructure, health, education, etc.
The ministry, in a statement made available to BusinessDay, noted that Kemi Adeosun, the finance minister, was passionately committed to making these happen in a manner that is evident in the way she has spoken about them in public.
Marshall Gundu, director of press at the ministry, who signed the statement, said the minister appeared unfazed by the enormity of the challenges and exuded intense positive energy and optimism about the financial prospects of the country and had a measured dose of patriotic anger to change things.
“Adeosun has, besides pushing for a renewed drive towards enlarging non-oil revenues, dedicated significant energy towards fine-tuning existing systems like the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS), Treasury Single Account (TSA), and Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) to enable them to better plug systemic leakages in the government’s financial management system,” he said.
The minister had revealed, during a meeting with Senate Committee on Finance recently, that about 23,000 ghost workers had been discovered in the federal civil service and attributed that to the novel and creative idea that linked the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) and Bank Verification Number (BVN) platforms which helped in exposing the massive fraud being perpetrated by civil servants.
She disclosed further that by using the BVN alongside the IPPIS database, it was possible to identify multiple accounts that were tied to individual BVNs, citing an instance where about 20 names were linked to one BVN.
She assured that after investigations, those found culpable would be prosecuted, adding that banks that would be found to have connived and knowingly facilitated the fraud would be compelled to refund the monies to the federal purse.
Gundu hinted further that besides the discovery of ghost workers, the same creative and innovation tweaking of the IPPIS platform and BVN by the minister and her team has led to a record enrolment of 320,000 staff onto the unified salary processing system within just two months, noting that the number far exceeded the 295,000 enrolments which were done within a five-year period by the previous administration and discovery of about 60,000 ghost workers.
He added that the minister had also focused the cost of overheads and expenses by ministries, departments, agencies MDAs, pointing out that overheads constituted a significant proportion of the government’s yearly recurrent budget. “Over the years, total budgeted overhead for public expenditure has averaged about N360 billion yearly. Investigations show that most of these costs are arbitrarily fixed, as there are no clear and uniform benchmarks to establish their integrity. There are instances where the same item is quoted for different amounts by different ministries”, he emphasised.
Gundu explained that the Efficiency Unit set up in the ministry recently was aimed to enforce a new culture of prudence and fiscal discipline in the budgeting, procurement and expenditure processes of all government agencies and parastatals, adding that the minister had issued guidelines to these agencies, ministries and parastatals on costing and expenditure to enforce uniformity across board.
