Daud Olatunji
The Federal Government has been unable to provide sufficient records to establish that N33.75bn in electronic cash transfers made to more than 3.29 million households in 2023 actually reached genuine beneficiaries, according to the Auditor-General for the Federation.
The disclosure is contained in the Auditor-General’s 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance/Internal Control Weaknesses in Ministries, Departments and Agencies, which examined financial transactions of the National Cash Transfer Office in Abuja for the 2023 financial year.
The report raised eight separate audit queries involving billions of naira and identified significant weaknesses in the financial controls of the cash transfer programme.
According to the report, a total of N33,751,080,000 was electronically transferred to 3,295,207 households and beneficiaries drawn from the National Social Register and enrolled on the National Beneficiary Register across 35 states.
However, the auditors said the payment vouchers did not contain sufficient details of the beneficiaries, while the Remita statement required to reconcile the payments with the names on the registers was not made available.
The development, the auditors said, made it impossible to authenticate the payments or establish whether the funds were received by genuine beneficiaries.
The report stated that the absence of the Remita records “hindered the authentication of the payments” and made it difficult to determine whether the beneficiaries who received the money were genuine.
It further alleged that efforts by the auditors to obtain the Remita statement were obstructed by accounts officials of the National Cash Transfer Office.
The Auditor-General consequently warned of the possibility of payments being made to ineligible or fictitious beneficiaries, as well as the potential loss of public funds.
The report recommended that the National Programme Manager account for the N33.75bn before the Public Accounts Committees of the National Assembly and produce evidence that the listed beneficiaries received the payments.
It also recommended that any amount that could not be satisfactorily accounted for should be recovered and remitted to the Treasury.
According to the report, the management of the National Cash Transfer Office did not respond to the audit query.
The Auditor-General also queried N36.744bn paid through 215 vouchers in December 2023 in respect of SS, IDA and output-based transactions.
The payments, the report said, were made without the mandatory internal audit and pre-payment checks.
“None of the paid vouchers were pre-audited or checked by the Internal Audit as required by extant regulations,” the report stated.
The auditors said the internal audit checks were instead conducted after the payments had been made, raising concerns about possible misapplication and diversion of public funds.
The report recommended that the N36.74bn be properly accounted for before the National Assembly.
Another N4.616bn involving 101 payments from the NCTO’s S&S/IDA Cash Book was also not supported by paid vouchers.
The auditors warned that the unsupported transactions could expose public funds to diversion and recommended that the money be accounted for or recovered and paid into the Treasury.
The report further identified N350.18m disbursed to states for the enrolment of unbanked beneficiaries as inadequately accounted for.
Of the N3.09bn paid in 32 transactions to states, supporting documents were provided for N2.74bn disbursed to 34 states, leaving N350.18m without adequate documentation.
The auditors said the vouchers lacked key supporting records, including beneficiary lists, photographs, attendance registers, enrolment reports and acknowledgements from recipients.
The Auditor-General recommended the recovery of the N350.18m if the funds could not be satisfactorily accounted for.
The audit also queried N393.71m reportedly returned by nine State Cash Transfer Units.
According to the report, the National Cash Transfer Office failed to provide documents showing that the refunded money had been paid into the Consolidated Revenue Fund.
There were also no Remita inflow statements or payment slips to support the transactions.
The auditors further noted that there was no evidence that the affected states subsequently carried out the enrolment exercises for which the funds had been provided.
The office also came under scrutiny over N280.42m paid as a 30 per cent mobilisation to Payment Service Providers without an Advance Payment Guarantee.
The auditors said they found no evidence of due process, including pre-qualification documents, bidding records or technical and financial evaluation reports.
They recommended recovery of the money, citing the risk of paying for jobs not performed and possible diversion of public funds.
Similarly, store items worth N89.51m purchased by the office were not entered in its store ledger.
The report said no Store Receipt Vouchers or Store Issue Vouchers were attached to the transactions, while the store ledger had not been updated since 2020.
The office was also faulted for spending N17.42m on diesel through cash advances to staff instead of following the procurement process.
The auditors said the expenditure exceeded the N200,000 procurement threshold and that the diesel purchased could neither be sighted nor traced to the stores.
They further estimated that the procurement method resulted in about N2.18m in foregone Value Added Tax and Withholding Tax revenue.
The Auditor-General said the management of the National Cash Transfer Office failed to respond to all eight audit queries raised in the report.
The findings come amid growing scrutiny of Nigeria’s social intervention programmes, particularly the Federal Government’s cash transfer scheme introduced to cushion the impact of economic hardship.
Nigeria has also drawn an additional $208.29m from the World Bank’s $800m National Social Safety Net Programme-Scale Up, bringing cumulative disbursements to about $744.61m, representing 93.1 per cent of the facility.
The programme was designed to expand Nigeria’s social protection system and provide cash assistance to poor and vulnerable households.
Following the removal of the petrol subsidy in 2023, the Federal Government revised the planned N5,000 monthly transfer to N25,000 for three months, with a target of 15 million households.
The cash transfer programme has, however, been dogged by controversies over beneficiary figures, payment verification and alleged financial mismanagement.
The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission had investigated an alleged N37.1bn fraud involving the programme under former Humanitarian Affairs Minister, Sadiya Umar-Farouq.
Her successor, Betta Edu, was suspended following a reported N585m transfer to a private account, while the former National Social Investment Programme Authority head, Halima Shehu, was arrested over alleged movement of N44bn from agency accounts.
In 2025, the World Bank reportedly disclosed that only 37 per cent of targeted households had benefited from the conditional cash transfer programme.
The latest audit findings are likely to intensify calls for greater transparency in the management of the social intervention programme, particularly the publication of verified beneficiary lists, payment records and state-by-state disbursements.
Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar has also called on the Federal Government to reconcile conflicting beneficiary figures and make public verified household records, payment tranches, state-by-state distributions, failed transactions and reversals.
The Auditor-General’s findings, however, do not by themselves establish that the entire N33.75bn was diverted or fraudulently paid. Rather, the report highlights the failure of the National Cash Transfer Office to provide sufficient documentation to enable auditors to independently verify the beneficiaries and payments..
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