Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) on Tuesday disclosed that it mopped-up N189 billion unspent wages from ministries, agencies and departments (MDAs) in 2019 and 2020.
This is just as the House of Representatives’ joint committee on Anti-Corruption and Public Service Matters summoned all heads of federal MDAs to appear before it on allegations of corruption and bloated nominal rolls.
The chairman of the ICPC, Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye, who was represented by a consultant, Mr Bako Gad, said, “The ICPC has by virtue of sections B, C and D of our enabling Act been conducting a wide range of investigations to uncover acts of corrupt practices in our MDAs and more.
“We discovered that almost every MDA, after paying wages every month, had huge unspent balances. And how did they come up with these unspent balances, we also discovered that people who retire, resign and are sacked are retained on the pay rolls.
“By doing so, we recovered N42 billion and N147 billion unspent balances from MDAs in 2019 and 2020 respectively. We have been able to block these leakages and today, as soon as salaries are paid, any balance remaining in any of the accounts are returned to the treasury so they no longer have access to it.
“We also found out about what’s called irregular allowance and MDAs did whatever they want with these funds and we have worked out a way of restricting access to these irregular allowances and cannot be touched by any MDA unless if merited with justification.
“Now, we demand that they submit nominal rolls every month and we try to remove any form of anomalies,” the ICPC representative told the panel.
The committee had called for the investigative hearing following invitations to various MDAs to cause appearances with a view to making presentations regarding their involvement in the alleged bloating of staff emolument lists and what they had been doing with hundreds of billions of unspent wage balances.
But contrary to the lawmakers’ expectations, no single minister, permanent secretary and director-general was present to respond to the questions relating to their establishments.
Angered by the development, the panel co-chaired by Hon. Shehu Nicholas Garba, told journalists that the committee was not prepared to entertain anyone below the rank of a chief executive of an agency or ministry in its investigation.
Hon. Garba said, “A situation where almost 100 percent of what the country earns goes into recurrent expenditure, there will be nothing left for capital expenditure and the development of infrastructure.”
