In addition, the federal government has ordered all banks still holding on to government funds “to transfer all remaining balances in the accounts of Federal Government owned MDAs in their custody without express exemption to the TSA”.
Minister of Finance Budget and National Planning Mrs Zainab Ahmed made this known in Abuja on Tuesday at the inauguration of the board of the Treasury Single Account (TSA).
According to Zainab Ahmed, “in 2018, we conducted a post implementation compliance exercise to determine the extent to which MDAs and Deposit Money Banks complied with the Presidential directive on TSA of 7th August, 2015. The finding was that huge amounts of public funds were still trapped in commercial banks”.
At the end of the implementation compliance exercise, Zainab Ahmed disclosed that “the banks have not been co-operating with the Consultants assigned to sweep these funds to the TSA”.
For failing to co-operate with the consultants, she ordered “the affected banks to transfer all remaining balances in the accounts of Federal Government owned MDAs in their custody without express exemption to the TSA”.
In addition, she said government was already “compiling the list of affected banks and MDAs for submission to anti-corruption agencies for enforcement”.
“For the avoidance of doubt, except for selected accounts of NNPC and WAEC, no other MDA or fund of Federal Government is exempted from the TSA” she warned.
Generally speaking, the finance minister noted that government’s TSA experience has been a pleasant one.
According to her, “the centralization of our banking arrangement has made it easier to determine government cash balances, reduce cost of borrowing, enhance liquidity, block leakages and improve internally generated revenue performance”.
By using the TSA platform, she said government has “automated direct deduction of operating surplus of eligible agencies. At the last count, 16 agencies are covered and more will be added in the coming months”.
The impact of this decision on government internally generated revenue performance she said has been impressive. “Between January and October 2021, a total of N86 billion in revenue was generated through this means” she revealed.
Ahmed disclosed that “aggregate collection of N7 trillion was made from 22 million transactions between January and November, 2021while N19 trillion worth of payments were processed from 20 million transactions within the same period.
Notwithstanding the obvious constraint experienced, government, Zainab Ahmed said, now insists that “other service providers should be accommodated in the TSA collection process provided they are integrated with Remita”.
“The reason is that without such integration, it would be difficult to keep track of transactions in diverse, stand-alone collection applications”.
The minister noted that government was aware of the challenges MDAs have been facing since early December, 2020 with respect to access to TSA bank statement and creation of service types for collection.
TSA Supervisory Board comprises of the: Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning – Chairman; Accountant-General of the Federation – Deputy Chairman; Deputy Governor (Operations), Central Bank of Nigeria – member; Director-General, Debt Management Office – member; Representative of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation – member; Chairman, Federal Inland Revenue Service – member; Chief Financial Officer, NNPC – member; Director-General, Bureau for Public Service Reforms – member; Auditor-General for the Federation – member and Director, Treasury Single Accounts OAGF – Secretary.
