- Consolidates over 20,000 accounts
- Earmarks N13.2 bn for Staff’s promotion, arrears
Despite sustained criticisms by some finance experts over its implementation, the Federal Government says it is all good news from the Treasury Single Account (TSA) policy with over N4.7 billion accruing as monthly savings from assorted bank charges.
Also, the government said that about N13.2 billion has been earmarked to settle accumulated amounts and outstanding arrears from civil servants’ promotion in the last couple of years.
Accountant-General of the Federation, Alhaji Ahmed Idris, who spoke in Abuja on Wednesday, said the massive savings come from over 20,000 consolidated public sector bank accounts in the last two years of implementing the TSA.
Idris said government’s aggressive implementation of the TSA across board has largely checked multiple banking arrangements hitherto deployed as possible fraud channels by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
He told participants at a two-day workshop on the TSA and other public financial management reforms that consolidating public sector accounts has clearly enhanced “transparency and effective tracking of government revenues”.
According to him, the federal government was incurring about N4.7 billion monthly as bank charges, interest on loans, and account maintenance fees among other charges before the advent of TSA policy as part of the public sector financial management reforms,
The AGF stated that government’s withdrawal of public funds from Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) has “made it difficult to impose any charges on federal government funds as the government now maintains a single account for all its agencies with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)”.
Highlighting the TSA’s benefits further, Alhaji Idris said the policy has eliminated from the system inherent practice of arbitrary borrowings by MDAs with government making huge savings from bank charges hitherto linked to some unnecessary loans.
The “TSA has enabled us to make tremendous gains to the federal government and to the Nigerian economy; we have successfully eliminated multiple banking arrangements, resulting in consolidation of over 20,000 bank accounts which were spread over Deposit Money banks across the country”, the AGF said.
Furthermore, he said huge leakages and abuse that characterized the public finance management prior to the advent of TSA are now in the past, adding that in spite of suspicions in certain quarters, the policy implementation has greatly sanitized federal government financial system.
Speaking on outstanding payments arising from arrears and backlogs of civil servants’ promotions, Alhaji Idris said the government is currently processing the payments for all the affected personnel, adding however that it has already introduced a new approach meant to address any abuse within the process.
“Henceforth, the accounts of those that were promoted and are being owed arrears would be credited directly after all the necessary verification exercise”, the AGF said.
On efforts by the AGF’s Office to continually improve public service accounts management with accountability and transparency as the watchword, Alhjai Idris said plans have been put in place for sustained capacity building among its personnel.
He said this include the planned training and certification packaged by Hewlett-Packard (HP) for the OAGF’s software engineers as well as other Nigerians that are interested in acquiring such valuable knowledge and skills.
