2019 Budget: How We Prevented MDAs From Padding N42 billion – ICPC
The anti-corruption agency, ICPC, has explained how it prevented 201 federal ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) from padding a total sum of N41.9billion in the national budget.
This was disclosed via a statement posted on the ICPC Twitter handle on Wednesday.
“Do you know that ICPC prevented N41.98 billion from taking flight through corruption as padded personnel cost of some MDAs in 2019?” the post read.
President Muhammadu Buhari in June last year signed a total spending of ₦8.92 trillion for the 2019 budget, from the ₦8.83 trillion proposal he had presented in December 2018 to the National Assembly.
The amount reflects a net increase of about ₦90.33 billion made by the National Assembly.
The overall budget comprises MDAs’ budgetary allocations which usually come under either capital or recurrent expenditure.
PREMIUM TIMES had reported in February how the ICPC ‘prevented’ over 200 Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) from squandering N41.98 billion unspent funds last year.
But the ICPC in its statement revealed how it prevented the MDA’s from squandering the amount.
Olusegun Adigun, the ICPC head of planning, research and review department, said, the Commission was able to recover such amounts through its System Study and Review process.
The SSR is one of the preventive measures designed by the Commission to reduce the scourge of corruption across all MDAs.
The Commission said about N41.9 billion was added to the budget as personnel cost of some government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs).
Mr Adigun said the SSR was able to prevent and recover the huge sum of bloated personnel expenditure from the agencies.
“When the current board came on board, the board directed that the Commission should carry out a personnel cost and capital development cost of MDA’s and we were able to cover about 201 MDAs,” he said.
“And in the course of the exercise, we were able to restrain the sum of N41.98 billion in 2019 which would have gone to the covers of unscrupulous government officials. That was what we were able to achieve under the SSR process.”
The Commission said the monies were enough to construct 774 standard primary healthcare centres and 8,809 boreholes across the country.
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