Service Wide Votes: MDAs risk forfeiting 2023 budgets-Senate
By Tunde Opalana
State House, Budget Office of the Federation, Ministry of Interior, Galaxy Backbone and some other federal government agencies risk not having their financial proposals captured in the 2023 budgets.
This is as the Senate threatened warrant of arrest of heads of agencies that have continuously been shunning the invitation from the Senate Public Account Committee (SPAC) to respond to queries on their finances.
The Committee lamented that over N5 trillion collected from the Service Wide Votes by some of the agencies were not accounted for.
Chairman of the SPAC, Senator Mathew Urhoghide on Wednesday warned the agencies of the risk of not having 2023 budget while kick- starting the Investigation of 252 government agencies who benefited from N5 trillion Service Wide Votes (SWV) between 2017 and 2021.
A Service Wide Vote (SWV) which is also known as the Consolidated Revenue Fund Charge is more or less the country’s contingency fund in the annual budget.
The decision of the Senate to investigate the Service Wide Votes (SWV) was as a result of discovery by Senate that many agencies collected Fund from SWV without notifying the National Assembly Panels that is mandated by law to oversight the agencies.
Addressing newsmen, the Chairman of the Committee, Senator Urhoghide said that the Investigation has to do with disbursement of Service Wide Votes between 2017 and 2021 adding the Service Wide Votes has become major component of nation’s budget considering amount budgeted annually for it in the budget.
He said the Committee has to see how the money collected from Service Wide Votes is being expended because there are confusion on the approval of the votes.
According to him, “we want to see how this money is being expended there are confusion on approval, we want to really get to know what is going on.”
He added the Committee will not hesitate to hesitate to issue warrant of arrest of any agency that fails to appear before the Committee because it has been discovered that many agencies collected this fund without informing the National Assembly Committee saddled with responsibility to oversight activities of the agencies.
“We will not hesitate to invoke provision of Section 88 and 89 of the constitution to demand warrant of arrest or write to the Senate demanding that their budgets for 2023 should not be approved,” he said.
He warned that the Committee will not tolerate the absence of Galaxy Backbone, Ministry of Interior, Budget Office, State House, and NBET who are scheduled to appear before the committee.
He added that Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) collected N180 billion from the votes, NBET collected N2.9 billion and Ministry of Humanitarian, received N445 billion from the votes, adding that none of them has given documents backing up expenditure of such fund graciously approved by the Presidency.
The SPAC solicited the cooperation of the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation in tracking every fund released by government.
Among the 252 Ministries, Departments and Agencies that are expected to appear in the ongoing Investigation of Service Wide Votes between 2017 till 2021 are Ministry of Information and Culture, Defence, NHIS, Police, Ministry of Power, Bank of Industry, Water Resources, National Assembly, Public Complaint Commission (PCC), Directorate of State Service (DSS) and Presidential Amnesty Programme.
