A particular Senior Planning Officer received the sum of N1,221,000 from the public treasury. She purportedly used the same in procuring high-tech phones for the retired Permanent Secretary and 14 departmental heads. The sum was disbursed through 3 different Payment Vouchers as follows;
i. PV No. 7 of Feb. 2019 – N283,000
ii. PV No. 8 of February 2019 – N469,000
iii. PV No. 9 of February 2019 – N469,000
The expenditures were sourced from the UNICEF-Supported Programmes and Projects Fund. A breakdown of the details showed that the unit price for INFINIX Note 4 phones given to the department heads was N65,000 and IPAD APPLE 6 was N280,000. It was observed that the approval was made by the retired permanent secretary who was one of the beneficiaries. There was no evidence to suggest the involvement of the former Honourable Commissioner or Governor. It was not established through the audit the nexus between the expenditures and the source of funding as well as the relevance of the phones to all the departmental heads in realizing the UNICEF objectives. The only justification was that money was available and there was no strict control on how it should be spent.
The expenditure was not only inappropriate, misplaced, and wrong; it constituted a misapplication of public money. Public money is not for the bazaar and should not be disbursed at the whims and caprices of the authorizing officers. To underscore the recklessness with which public resources were treated these phones were not recorded anywhere as Government property thus, allowing the beneficiaries to convert them to personal use.
The Permanent Secretary was requested to;
i. Obtain from Senior Planning Officer the invoices for the purchase of the phones,
ii. retrieve the IPAD APPLE 6 phone from the retired Permanent Secretary,
iii. retrieve the INFINIX Note 4 phone from the benefiting departmental heads that might have retired or transferred out of the Ministry, and
iv. Cause the store unit to document all the phones (both retrieved and others in use).
The retrieved phones are to be re-issued to serving departmental heads. In the absence of any evidence that the phones were bought, the sum of N1,221,000 should be recovered from Senior Planning Officer and paid into the Government treasury.
N/A
N/A
Click to enlarge image
Seach for project by title, MDA, state, status, year…
Do you know of project(s) in your community that has been abandoned, not executed or poorly implemented. Our team is ready to help you track it and get government to act.
Value for Money allows you to track, report and act on audited development projects abandoned, not executed or poorly implemented in your community to ensure public funds are efficiently, effectively, and economically utilized to improve service delivery to you and other citizens in Nigeria
Stay in the loop, get all project updates straight in your inbox.
