The House of Representatives Committee on Basic Education directs the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) to provide a roster of tertiary institutions engaged in irregular and unlawful admissions.
The committee also praised the examination body for ensuring “transparency in all its financial transactions and other activities.”
A statement released on Thursday by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board’s Head of Public Relations, Fabian Benjamin, highlighted that the committee, chaired by Oforji Oboku, issued the commendation on Wednesday in Abuja.
During an interactive session with the management of JAMB and a representative of the Accountant General of the Federation, the lawmakers, upon receiving a comprehensive 392-page document from JAMB containing audited accounts from 2019 to 2022, procurement details, budget performance, and evidence of remittances, among other information, expressed satisfaction with the high level of transparency demonstrated by the examination body.
“I must commend the entire management of JAMB. We know what records said before they assumed office; we know what records are saying now. The transparency efforts of the organisation, the changes we have seen in revenue, the remittances,… JAMB, we still say kudos to you,” a member of the committee, Sina Oyedeji, said in the statement.
The committee, having received the financial records presentation from the representative of the Accountant General of the Federation, Anum Lucy, established a “unit committee” to investigate the reasons behind the slight discrepancies identified in the financial records presented by JAMB and those from the Accountant General’s Office.
In response to raised concerns, JAMB registrar Prof. Ishaq Oloyede attributed some of the discrepancies to unrecorded payment charges by the Accountant General’s Office.
Oloyede, who said JAMB has been making remittances to the Federal Government’s coffers since 2017, revealed that the exam body does not receive allocations for capital projects and overhead from the national budget.
“We don’t collect capital; we don’t collect overhead; if you look at the budgets of other agencies in our category, you will see they collect capital and overhead, but neither of these do we collect; despite that, we make returns from what we collected. Our own IGR is what we spend on capital projects,” he said.
In her earlier presentation, Anum Lucy, the representative of the Accountant General of the Federation, stated that JAMB initiated its annual remittances to the Federal Government’s account with a sum of N7.8 billion in 2017.
She said, “JAMB as an organisation started remitting revenue to the coffers of the government in 2017, and in that year, they remitted N7.8bn to the coffers of the government.
“In 2018, it was N5.2bn. In 2019, it was N3.6bn. In the year 2020, it was N3.8bn. In 2021, it was N3.5bn, and N3.1bn in 2022.”
Meanwhile, the statement noted that the committee has resolved to invite Zenith Bank Plc over its disagreement with JAMB following a disagreement on their past transactions.
“A member of the committee had drawn attention to N497m said to be indebted to Zenith Bank by JAMB and the N4.2bn uncovered by a forensic audit, which the bank was supposed to have paid the exam body from sales of registration forms before 2017.
“The committee said its intervention on the issue, which is said to be currently handled by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, is to ensure a smooth resolution of the conflict.
“While passing a motion directing JAMB to submit the forensic audit report on the N4.2bn owed by the bank, the committee also ordered the exam body to present before it the list of tertiary education institutions that have conducted irregular or illegal admissions across the country as well as its past recruitment list,” the statement read.