By Crispina Cummings
Parliament has summoned officials of the ministry of mines and mineral resources and those of the National Revenue Authority to answer to claims of fiscal indiscipline contained in the country’s 2010/2011 auditor general’s report.
Deputy auditor general, Tamba Momoh said that receipts issued by the ministry as payments totalling Le 18, 300,000 and $19,690 in respect of monitoring and rehabilitation fees, were not deposited into the bank account.
Responding to the query, permanent secretary in the ministry of mines, Fatmata Mustapha said “the monies were used to meet emergency needs of the ministry at a time when revenue inflow was very slow and allocations were not timely and also to pay transportation for officials to the provinces when there were strike actions by workers.”
She said efforts were being made to have such expenditures documented for future reference.
When asked what the law said about monies collected Mustapha responded that it should be paid into the consolidated fund.
The committee asked the ministry’s accountant, Ronald George what he had done to handle such “unprofessional” accounting practices, but he said he was still trying to put things in place. He was accused of complacency and reprimanded for not doing enough to stop the practice which they claimed was still on-going in the ministry.
The deputy auditor general observed that the cadastre system was inefficient, pointing out that the NRA cashbook showed that Le13, 404, 880 being payment for license, could not be traced in the cadastre system.
Manager for the cadastre system, Eugene Norman, explained that the system was at its initial stage of development since 2010 and that efforts were being made to normalize the system.
But the auditor argued that “no Information Technology policy was being maintained in the system in relation to the level of access to the system. Because of this control weakness, there have been variances between the revenue collected by the ministry and NRA”.
Momoh said that for 2010 the revenue authority collected about Le 20, 305,000,000 but banked only Le 19, 776, 000,000 leavening a balance of Le 422 million unaccounted for.
He said a letter forwarding the official query raised on their own operational area had been dispatched to the NRA for comments or reactions and there had been no reply to that request.
Politico 03/08/13
