……Develops Revenue Computation, Allocation Software
The Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) at the weekend said it recovered N319 billion unremitted revenues from Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) over the last two years.
The Chairman of the commission, Mohammed Shehu, who gave this hint during a media chat in a media on Saturday, explained that the Commission had to engage the service of forensic experts to discover the unremitted money from the MDAS as some of their accounting system remained complicated.
According to him, aside the engagement of forensic experts, the RMAFC’s management also worked with law enforcement agencies like the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to investigate the MDAs before the remittances were made to the federation account.
He clarified: “If there is an MDA or organization that has established liability and has owned up to the liability and they decide not to pay, sometimes we request the services of EFCC and they have been helping.
“Some MDAs are so complicated that sometimes we have to hire forensic experts or teams of consultants to look deeper into their books. Sometimes, they end up discovering huge sums of unremitted money.
“Within the last two years, we discovered over N319 billion that has been established and it has been remitted to the appropriate account of the federation”, Shehu added.
On the commission’s efforts to block revenue leakages in the public finance system, he said that in line with its statutory mandate, the commission was doing its best to monitor revenue generation and disbursements from the federation account to all tiers of government.
Shehu expatiated: “That act of monitoring involves where to get the money from, to check and see whether revenue generating agencies, which are specifically mentioned in the Act, are living up to expectations. The law mandates the commission to have the power to request information from any revenue-generating agency.
“That means we have the right to go through the books of all government agencies to see the revenue they collected and what they remitted.
“We have committees for customs, Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), crude oil, gas, special duties, and solid minerals. These committees are mandated to carry out monitoring activities across Nigeria.
“For instance, the customs committee usually goes to the customs services and other companies around the south-west, especially, where you have a heavy dose of manufacturing to look into their books. They do this in collaboration with the Nigeria Customs Service” the RMAFC boss added.
Meanwhile, the RMAFC boss also disclosed that the commission had developed software to enhance transparency in its revenue formulation and sharing amongst the three tiers of government.
He expressed optimism that the software would help the commission in its current efforts aimed at reviewing the revenue allocation formula for the tiers of government and help to address the challenges associated with manual computation of what each tier of government will get from federally collected revenues will be seriously reduced.
Shehu said: “There is something called the vertical revenue allocation formula; who gets what percentage – Federal, State or Local Government (LG). There is also the horizontal formula; how do you share that percentage among states and LGs.
“That means you have to consider factors like population, school enrollment, land mass, hospital beds; these are some of the indices. Previously what we did was to request for the required information manually, and then the commission will go and do the inspection manually”, he added.
Explaining that the commission also sources data from relevant agencies like the Office of the Statistician-General of the Federation and the National Boundary Commission, the RMAFC boss explained that the commission now has “software through which the states and LGs will input the required data in the system. They have a passcode. We will collect the data that they sent; analyze it and also send our own team for verification, and then we will agree on how that horizontal formula will be.”
