A fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), Sola Oyetayo, has urged the institute to implement the recommendations of the Electoral Matters Special Investigation Panel.
The panel had called for the cancellation of ICAN’s election held last May.
It said a fresh election should be conducted as soon as it was practicable while none of the 28 contestants should remain on the council, until the new poll is held.
Oyatayo said about 300 members of the institute have called on the president/chairman of council to convene a special general meeting to consider and adopt the recommendations after it was found that the council allegedly rejected them.
The issues at stake, he said, include fraud and identity theft; what to do with results of the elections; what to do with the IT personnel who aided the fraud; revamping the electoral process, among others.
The special panel’s report, which was submitted to ICAN’s council on December 1, concluded that there was sufficient evidence that the voters’ list was grossly compromised and the allegation of massive fraud was proved beyond reasonable doubt.
It also found that cyber-crime was committed in the election, and a number of innocent ICAN members were victims of identity theft.
“Over 80 per cent of the fraudulent votes were credited to the nine winners. Ironically, the ICAN rules that all voters must vote for all vacant seats made it impossible to separate the innocent candidates from the dishonest ones,” the panel said.
It added that it was apparent that the electoral fraud was carried out by workers in the IT department at the instigation of some ICAN members who stood to benefit.
It said from the forensic auditor’s report, 1,191 fake voters cast 10,719 votes, representing 21.884 per cent of 49,068 votes cast.
Among its recommendations was that work must begin immediately to compile a new voters’ list “as the existing one has been extensively compromised”.
The panel said: “If the electoral process can be grossly compromised, other sections in the IT department might also have been compromised. We are particularly concerned about the examination process where the stakes are by far higher. Therefore, the entire IT personnel should be cleaned out and the department sanitised.
“In the circumstance, the institute should immediately engage one of the big firms with a strong IT department to review the electoral process, and possibly temporarily take over the running of the IT department until credible workers are recruited.
“Discreet enquiries should be made from law enforcement agencies, if it is possible, to unmask the ICAN members involved in this destructive act so that proper disciplinary actions can be carried out against them in accordance with the ICAN Act.
“ICAN electoral rules should be revisited in the light of what has been revealed in this and earlier investigations in order to re-establish members’ trust in the electoral process.”
Investigation of the fraud was prompted by Oyetayo’s first memo in which he alleged, among others, that the institute’s system was hacked into and that qualified members were impersonated after their PIN numbers were fraudulently obtained.
Oyetayo said the 2015 council elections could not be conducted peacefully and credibly without resolving the critical issues arising from the 2014 election.
On ICAN’s electoral process, he said: “I strongly believe that the first thing to do is to discard the idea of group voting as it not only promotes mediocrity and brings division of council along ethnic and religious lines. It is also unconstitutional because it negates the principles of fundamental human rights.”
