SAN FRANCISCO, August 16, (THEWILL) – Since the collapse of all accounts of Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, into the Treasury Single Account, TSA, the federal government has consolidated over 20,000 public sector bank accounts and in the process saved N4.7 billion monthly from bank charges.
This was disclosed in Abuja on Wednesday by the Accountant-General of the Federation, Alhaji Ahmed Idris, at a two-day workshop for finance correspondents on the TSA and other public financial management reforms.
He disclosed that by aggressively implementing the TSA across board, the federal government has been able to eliminate multiple banking arrangements that were hitherto used as fraud channels.
Idris explained that the consolidation of public sector accounts “has further brought about transparency and effective tracking of government revenues”.
He revealed that before the policy was introduced into the public sector as part of the public financial management reforms, a monthly sum of N4.7 billion was incurred by the Federal Government as bank charges, interest on loans, and account maintenance fees among other charges.
He added that by withdrawing public funds from banks, the federal government “had 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”.
The accountant-general said the TSA policy has helped the government to overcome indiscriminate borrowings by MDAs resulting in government saving a lot of bank charges associated with these borrowings.
According to him, “as part of our stewardship, 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.”
Idris further stated that stiff implementation of the TSA policy has led to the blocking of leakages and abuse which characterized the public finance management prior to its advent.
On the payment of backlogs of promotion arrears for civil servants, he stated that that the federal government has commenced the process of making payments to affected civil servants.
He said a new approach has been adopted to check the rate of abuse of 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.”
To this end, he revealed that about N13.2 billion “had been provided for the payments of backlogs of promotion for civil servants.”
Idris also disclosed that his Office has concluded plans with Hewlett-Packard, HP, for the training and certification of its software engineers and prospective Nigerians.
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