Senate Probes Ministry over Alleged Forgery to Justify N208m Payment
Sunday Aborisade in Abuja
The Senate Public Accounts Committee (SPAC) has accused officials of the Federal Ministry of Labour of allegedly forging signatures of some participants to justify the N208m it spent on the Zonal Skill Acquisition it organised.
The programme took place at all the six geopolitical zones of the federation in 2021, with each zone collecting N35 million except the South-east which got N32 million.
The amount spent to fund the programme was drawn from Service Wide Vote (SWV) which has become subject of investigation by the Senate Public Accounts Panel.
The ministry collected N2.3 billion from the SWV between 2017 and 2021.The sum of N1.146 billion was meant for capital expenditure while N1.162 billion was for recurrent.
The Ministry, according to SPAC, failed to subject the expenditure to the Auditor General of the Federation’s scrutiny.
The Senate Committee Chaired by Senator Mathew Urhoghide, while scrutinising the list of participants submitted by the Ministry at its last sitting, observed that a few persons signed for participants to enable them to collect their stipends in the six geopolitical zones.
Officials of the Ministry, during the session, failed to make available, the phone numbers of participants of the skill acquisition programme.
The Chairman of SPAC wondered why the officials paid millions of naira in cash for the programme instead of doing bank transfers.
He observed that the signatures of many participants appeared forged while some wrote their names as their signatures.
The Committee members also insisted that the Ministry should have made use of electronic transfer to pay the participants of training programme
Urhoghide said, “The signatures can’t stand forensic test if we subject to the forensic test. The money ought to have been paid straight into the accounts, you see one person signing for many people. There is a clear violation of E-payment.”
However, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Ms. Kachollom S. Dajua and Officials from the Ministry failed to give a convincing explanation to the Committee.
