2022 budget: No allocation for agencies without revenue projection, says Senate

The Senate Joint Committee on the Medium Term Expenditure and Fiscal Strategy Paper has threatened to sanction federal agencies which fail to submit their revenue projection alongside their 2022 budget proposal.

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, who is coordinating the joint panels, Senator Solomon Adeola, stated this on Friday after a three-day engagement with heads of revenue generating agencies on the MTEF/FSP.

Adeola specifically said agencies that fail to articulate their revenue projection in their budgets would not get any allocation in the 2022 federal budget.

He therefore called on the Minister of Finance, Zainab Ahmed, to consider a forensic auditing of the revenue profiles of all federal agencies in the country.

He said the Senate was determined to raise the independent revenue targets of government owned enterprises to about N2.5trn in the 2022 fiscal year.

He said the GOEs had so far generated N800bn as independent revenues this year and expressed the hope that the figure would rise to N1.3trn before the end of the year.

Adeola said, “We will remove any agency that fails to submit its proposed revenue target with the expenditure in the 2022 budget

“There is a public outcry that borrowings is on the high side. We are not saying that we are not going to borrow but we must reduce it. The only way to do thins is to look inwards and build our revenues.

“Many of the agencies that generate revenue spend them on frivolous expenditure.

“There are three agencies of government: Those that are partly funded, those that are fully funded and those that are not funded at all.

“By law, revenues generated by fully-funded agencies must be paid to the consolidated revenue account because the government will give them the recurrent expenditure,  personnel cost and capital expenditure.

“Going forward, government has decided that whatever partly-funded and not funded agencies generate, 50 per cent of such revenue will go to the Consolidated Revenue Fund.

“We are now going to 70-30. That is, only 30 per cent will be released to the agency while 70 will go to the CRF. We are going to amend the law again.

“Agencies that are generating revenue which are being fully funded must ensure that everything accruing to them must go to the CRF.

“Those that are partly funded or not funded at all, the law states that 80 per cent of their operational surplus must be paid to the CRF.

“We are hereby calling on the Minister of Finance that there is a need to carry out forensic audit into the expenditure of all agencies of government. This will curb frivolous expenditure and boost the country’s revenue base.

“Already we have realised N800bn from the independent revenues generated by the agencies so far this year, it used to be about N400m in the past. I am confident that we should be able to get up to N1.3tn by December.

“If we could manage to take it to N2.5tn in 2022, we would have taken care of one-fifth of the budget and we would not need to borrow.”

Credit: Punch