The House of Representatives has summoned the Minister and Permanent Secretary of Federal Ministry of Science and Technology as well as Head of Service of the Federation over 9 years of unaudited accounts of Natural Medicine Development Agency.
Chairman, House Committee on Public Accounts, Hon. Wole Oke issued the notice during the ongoing investigative hearing into the reckless refusal by non-treasury and partially funded agencies to render their audited accounts between 20011 and 2019.
Hon. Oke and members of the Committee who expressed displeasure over the queried the management team of the agency for failing to account for multi-billion naira appropriated for for nine years.
It was gathered that the agency got allocation of N377,931,365 out of which the sum of N255,222,949 was for recurrent while N122,708,417 was for capital expenditure for the year 2016.
In 2018 the agency got total allocation of N1.105 billion out of which N246,234,918 was for personnel, N56,176,596 was for overhead, N302,411,514 was for recurrent while N802,710,432 was for capital expenditure.
According to the Auditor General of the Federation, the Agency submitted only 2013 audit account while 2014 to 2019 are still outstanding.
While speaking on the sanction provided in the extant financial regulations, he noted that the offence amounts to gross misconduct.
While expressing disgust over the lackadaisical attitude of the accounting officers to the extant financial laws and regulations, Hon. Oke ruled that the Director in charge of Finance should “come with his employer – the Minister of Science and Technology and the Permanent Secretary as well as Head of Service of the Federation.
“Let them come and hear the story themselves. You have budgetary allocation but you didn’t render account,” Hon. Oke noted.
The Committee also resolved to conduct Status of Inquiry into the finances of Radiographers Registration Council of Nigeria for failing to render acount to the oAGF between 2015 and 2019.
