The Federal Government is not only winning the war against corruption but has saved over N500 billion from funds that would have been looted by officials of Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
Permanent Secretary, Special Duties, Federal Ministry of Finance, Dr. Mohammed Dikwa, said the government was able to make this huge savings by plugging leakages and wastages in government.
He said: “If the initiative was not in place, this amount of money we are talking about would have been spent by MDAs. It was because of this initiative that was put in place that we were able to save that money from treasury looters.
“When we came up with the policy, an average of 11,000 tips was received on a monthly basis, but now, we hardly receive 20 to 30 tips simply because people have reduced wrong doing in government.”
Dr. Dikwa spoke when he received in audience in his office, the Alumni of National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), Abuja Chapter.
He told the visitors that most of the achievements were recorded under his leadership at the Presidential Initiative for Continuous Audit (PICA), which he attributed to the experience he got from NIPSS.
He said: “Over the last four years, this administration has put in place a lot of policies on ground especially the financial policies put in place at the Ministry of Finance. There are tangible results we got over the years. One of the fundamental achievements was saving by the government of over N500billion from leakages and wastages under PICA.
“The primary focus of PICA is to put systems and frameworks in place over finance and spending of government revenue. The goal is to maximize the utilisation of the resources through continuous assurance, so as to ensure that requirements for improved efficiency, effectiveness and accountability are met.
“PICA has also put in place many measures such as the Whistle-blowing Policy. We were able to make not only recoveries, but stopped people from doing the wrong things as far as the government circle was concerned.”
According to him, in the past, when funds are released to MDAs for specific purposes, the funds were usually diverted into other things arbitrarily. “The external auditors will not know, so we came in between the external and internal audit to ensure that the money that is being released into MDAs are spent for that purpose, and we held all the Account Officers accountable for every kobo released to them,” he said.