Corruption has not stopped across Federal Government Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), despite several measures to curb financial infractions in public offices, chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC ), Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye has said.

He recently revealed this at a one-day forum titled, “Transparency and fiscal discipline in the implementation of federal government’s budget,” in Abuja.

According to him, recent investigation has shown that there was budget manipulation by most MDAs, which resulted in MDAs receiving both appropriation and releases beyond their actual needs.

He added that at the end of 2020, the funds tied down for non-existent personnel deprived government and indeed needy MDAs of much needed funds to apply to other critical but underfunded areas, especially overhead and capital development.

His words, “In general, our findings showed that there was budget manipulation by most MDAs which resulted in MDAs receiving both appropriation and releases beyond their actual needs. While these surpluses were open to the risk of being misappropriated as is tradition.”

“Sometimes, at the end of the year, the funds tied down for non-existent personnel deprived government and indeed needy MDAs of much needed funds to apply to other critical but underfunded areas, especially overhead and capital development.”

“In 2019 ICPC reviewed 208 agencies of government that are funded from the Federal Treasury and came up with outstanding results which included discovery of N31.8bn personnel cost surpluses for 2017 and 2018, and misapplication of N19.8bn and N9.2bn from Personnel Cost and Capital Fund respectively.”

“Consequent on these findings N42bn unspent surplus allocations for personnel cost for 2019 alone was blocked from possible abuse and pilfering mostly from health and some educational institutions. This implies that if we had covered the entire civil service structure of all MDAs the figures would be staggering.”