Senate threatens to recommend CBN governor, FIRS chairman, others sack over auditor-general’s queries

The Senate on Tuesday decried the failure of some critical revenue-generating agencies to respond to expenditure queries raised by the Office of Auditor-General for the Federation, (OAGF).

The Red Chamber, therefore, threatened to recommend the sack of the chief executives of such agencies to President Bola Tinubu for failing to respond to the queries.

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Aliyu Wadada, stated these at a news conference in Abuja.

He stressed the need for the agencies to account for the funds appropriated by the National Assembly in line with sections of the 1999 Constitution that empower the parliament to carry out oversight responsibilities.

Wadada said the auditor-general’s report which had been submitted to the committee raised significant queries on the expenditure of some of the agencies.

He listed some of the agencies that failed to appear before the committee to answer the audit queries to include the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), and Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, (NNPCL), among others.

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The lawmaker said the Senate would report heads of such agencies to the president after providing them with another opportunity to answer the queries.

He said: “All efforts to get Nigeria Customs Service to the table to know how this happened proved abortive.

“It is important for Nigerians to know what happened under ‘ways and means,’ and why the Central Bank of Nigeria debited borrowers and credited borrowers.

“Central Bank of Nigeria debited consolidated revenue funds account and credited treasury single account which amounted to over N30 trillion.

“Consolidated revenue funds account is a government account, and the TSA is also a government account.

“And in charging the interest, instead of the interest to be charged to the treasury account, they went ahead again to charge the treasury account.

“They also went ahead to the treasury account and charged the consolidated revenue funds account, which now has amounted to over N6 trillion.

“There were correspondences among the committee, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, and the Debt Management Office (DMO) because of the faulty document which they were not ready to answer and have been evasive.”

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