Incredible!

Our Reporter

I want to tell this honourable committee that as we speak, the service has no audited accounts because we have no approval from the BPP to engage external auditors.

We just got this approval recently and the external auditors sent a draft copy on the 2013 financial year to us just last week. We wrote several letters to the BPP on this until we got the nod, it is not our own making.”

This was indeed a startling revelation and it came from no less a personality than the Comptroller-General of Customs, Col. Hameed Ali (rtd.), who appeared before the Wole Oke-led House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts.

The comptroller-general, who was represented at the committee’s probe into the audit queries against the service between 2013 and 2014 financial years, as well as an alleged missing N14.8bn from the customs’ coffers, by a comptroller of the service, Mr. S I Ibrahim, blamed the development on the refusal by the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) to approve the engagement of external auditors for the service.

Shell-shocked, Oke had to remind the comptroller-general’s representative that he was on oath and should therefore mind his utterances.

The comptroller answered in the affirmative and even threatened that the service was ready to come before the committee with all relevant documents. Consequently, the committee chairman summoned the officials of the BPP to appear before it to tell the committee their own side of the story.

He also summoned the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, to come with the NCS statement of accounts in the period under review, with a view to tracking down the alleged missing N14.8bn contained in the query raised by the Auditor-General of the Federation (AuGF) on the 2013 financial year.

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We can understand why Oke was stunned by the revelation that customs’ accounts were not audited over a two-year period. Indeed, anyone who is conversant with the huge amounts that the NCS makes yearly should be surprised that the accounts of such an agency would go unaudited even for one year.

That is long enough for anyone to do an irredeemable damage to the agency’s finances.

In 2011, the service had surpassed the target of N596 billion set for it by the Federal Government as at the end of October of that year when it had already raked in N602billion. In spite of the recession that hit the economy from 2014 to 2017, the service was able to generate a record N1.37 trillion in 2017 as against the N770.57 billion revenue target for it.

In short, NCS collected a total revenue of about N3.1 trillion between January 2011 and August 2014. Specifically, in the two years under reference, it collected N622.2 billion (2013) and by end of August 2014, the service had raked in N622.2 billion. So, what was said to have been left unaudited was far in excess of N1.244 trillion.

This is huge by any standard. As a matter of fact, the committee chairman’s order to the Customs boss to produce three former accounts officers with the agency on another audit query of N28 million said to have been expended on a training programme for personnel at the service’s premises in Gwagwalada, Abuja, during which over N1m was paid out for hiring of a hall is in order; it reinforces the need for regular audit of the service.

The BPP should explain to the committee why it did not accede to the requests of the customs service to hire the services of external auditors to audit its accounts, if the allegation is true. Where necessary, the committee should recommend appropriate sanctions against those concerned.

Auditing is an integral part of transparency and accountability that should not be treated with levity in any establishment.