Senate summons IPPIS officials over N113m

The Senate has summoned officials of the Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) over missing N113 million disbursed from the votes from the Office of Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF).

The is against the background of the Senate’s probe of the disbursement of N4.9trillion service wide votes between 2017 and 2021.

Uncovering violation of procedures in disbursement of service wide votes to ministries, departments and agencies, the Senate Committee on Public Accounts chaired by Senator Matthew Urhoghide has been able to establish that the N113 millions disbursed from the AGF to Joint Admissions Matriculation Board (JAMB) for the recurrent expenditure in May 2017 was not requested neither received by the examination body.

While it was established that the examination body didn’t make such request, but the record from the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation did not show that the N113 million was reversed to the Federation Account.

The Director of Cash Management from the Ministry Finance, who represented the Permanent Secretary, Aliyu Ahmed, explained to the Senate Committee that JAMB did not apply for the N113 million.

He added that the request was made from the Ministry of Finance on their behalf in 2017 and the money was raised from service wide votes.

He said: “JAMB did not request for the N113 million for recurrent, the Ministry of Finance made the request for them when we observed the gap, and the money was not released to JAMB, but returned to IPPIS and at the end of the year was mopped up automatically.”

The Senate committee, has, however, observed that there is no record from Accountant-General of the Federation that the money was reversed to the Federation Account.

The committee also observed that many agencies received disbursement of service wide votes without any request, which is an outright violation of procedures inreleasingof servicewidevotes because there must be a request and approval must be given by the president before it can be released.

The representative of the Auditor-General of the Federation, Bamigbaye Oludotun, also said that Authority to Incure Expenditure (AIE) was raised from the Office of Accountant-General of Federation in favour of JAMB and the examination body did not receive the money and it was never reversed.

Submitting that the money is with IPPIS, Oludotun said that most agencies use to complain that they did not receive the money and the money will not be reversed, adding, “It means authority of approval was never obtained.”