Senate yesterday received the report of the Joint Committee on Finance, Banking, Insurance and Other Financial Institutions, and Public Accounts on the abuse and mismanagement of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) regime and called for the refund of about N7 billion to the Federal Government.
This is even as it called for the termination of the 2013 renewal contract between the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and SystemSpecs – a Lagos-based software firm, which provided the e-Payment/e-Collection solution used for transfer of government money by banks to the TSA.
The Senate had on November 11, 2015, debated a motion on “Abuse and Mismanagement of the TSA regime” and mandated the joint committee to carry out a holistic investigation on the matter.
Following concerns about the 1 percent collection fee, the CBN had last year instructed SystemSpecs to suspend all charges and refund all fees earned on the platform in line with the contract.
But presenting the report at Wednesday plenary, chairman of the joint committee, John Enoh, said the Federal Government was defrauded to the tune of N6,994,421,466 between March 1 and October 27, 2015.
Consequently, the upper legislative chamber recommended that N656,504,100 be provided as transaction cost for fund transfers/collections for the period instead of N7,650,925,566.
Enoh said the amount was arrived at using the upper end of the approved band of N700 per transaction for 937,869 transactions between March 1 and November 30, 2015.
“With an estimated total transfer of over N2.5 trillion by the end of 2015, baring the Senate resolution halting further deductions, the Federal Government could have paid about N25 billion to the platform provider, based on the charge of 1 percent transaction fee for all transactions/collections,” Enoh said.
The Senate then kicked against the practice of Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) bearing the cost of payment for e-collection service, saying this should not be borne by MDAs but provided and disbursed from a central pool. It also asked that the amount arrived at should be forwarded to the National Assembly for accommodation in the 2016 budget.
Furthermore, it directed the CBN to ensure the total refund of the portion of deduction retained by the apex bank and Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) and present evidence of compliance to the appropriate committee.
Under the sharing formula, 50 percent of the 1 percent collection fee is due to SystemSpecs, 40 percent to DMBs and 10 percent to the CBN.
The report revealed that out of the N7.651 billion deducted within the period as cost for collection, SystemSpecs collected N3.824 billion, DMBs N3.062 billion and CBN N764 million.
