The Fiscal Responsibility Commission (FRC), has said that through its statutorily defined activities it facilitated federal agencies to remit N2.6 trillion to the federation account in 12 years.
The commission’s Chairman, Chief Victor Muruako, who gave this hint on Monday at the opening of a five-day capacity building training for Fiscal Responsibility Boards of Kaduna and Sokoto States, said that the remittances made into the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF) came as operating surpluses from revenue generating agencies.
The commission’s chairman, who said that the commission in its previous activities had helped in plugging leakages in the public finance system, urged the participants to be good ambassadors of FRC, tasked them to apply more fiscal responsibility to check corruption in their various states.
He explained: “From our fiscal verification, we made a lot of observations that our revenue monitoring recovered tens of billions to the consolidated revenue fund and that is prevention of corruption.
“Those funds in those agencies would have been available for public officers to syphon but we caused them to remit them to the government coffers.
“More than N2.6 trillion was paid into the CRF of the Federal Government in the past 12 years as operating surplus from government corporations”, the chairman added.
Muruako also pointed out that the efforts of the commission had been complimenting the National Assembly’s legislative functions in terms of ensuring compliance to extant laws on revenue generation.
Specifically, he recalled that the commission participated as the reference agency in the over four months on revenue hearings in 2021 by the National Assembly.
According to him, the efforts “actually raised operating surplus remittance from N213 billion to 313 billion and the total independent revenue from 532 billion in 2020 to 1.2 trillion in 2021.”
The FRC chairman also hinted that the commission was working toward producing a template for the preparation of the Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) and establishment of Fiscal Responsibility Institute which will help to guide government agencies to strengthen prudence and accountability in the management of public finance.
In his remarks at the forum, the Chairman of Sokoto State Fiscal Responsibility Agency, Alhaji Aliyu Muhammad, said that the training was desirable for the agency to develop sufficient capacity to deliver on its mandate, especially on ensuring transparency and accountability in public finance.
Also, the Chairman of Fiscal Responsibility Commission, Kaduna, Mr. Murtala Dabo, expressed optimism that the training would assist the commission to institutionalise good governance in the state, particularly at a time when resources are hardly adequate to meet growing funding needs of the government.
