Grace Okon
The Minister of Finance Budget and Planning in collaboration with the office of the Accountant General of the Federation have been able to recover the sum of 53.5 billion within the last 12-18 months through the Government Integrated Finance Management Information System as a recovery touchpoint.
The Minister Zainab Ahmed, stated this in a press release signed by Phil Abiawume Mowete, the Director of Information during the launching of the Light House project program.
He disclosed that the ministry has aggregated monumental debts of approximately 5.2 trillion owned by the federal government.While noting that this also aggregated from 5000 debtors across ten Ministries Department and Agencies.
The Minister of Finance Budgeting lamented that despite the technology and data-centric world, we have not had a culture of using data and information to guide the formulation, implementation and impact assessment of initiatives and policies or even carrying out their mandate.
“The revenue performance support to agencies of the Ministry as well as other arms of government at federal levels is also a key resource to provide the ministry and all revenue agencies under the ministry with capacities to generate useful and insightful information for a more efficient and intelligent data-driven revenue mobilization”.
He added that one of the key economic policy objectives of the current administration as contained in the Economic Recovery and Growth plan is improving overall federal government revenue targeted and increasing revenue from non-oil revenue sources.
The Ministry Permanent Secretary, Aliyu Ahmed said that there was an urgent need to critically look at the ways of addressing the revenue loopholes across the public financial management space which threatened to impede the efforts of the present administration to deliver on the promises of job and wealth creation, infrastructural development, social and economic development.
“A review of significant revenue leakages in government was carried out by the ministry which revealed that companies and individuals who owned government agencies have refused to honour their obligations and are still transacting businesses with the government”.
Furthermore, Aliyu Shehu Shinkafi noted that the usefulness of the platform for revenue generation efforts would be dependent on the corporation and commitment of the MDAs to providing quality and relevant data to populated platforms.
