Reps Want RMAFC To Monitor Revenue Generating Agencies

The House of Representa
tives has called on the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation  and Fiscal  Commission (RMAFC) to concentrate  on revenue generating agencies  in order to find out   how much they generate  and what they remit into the federation account.
This  according to the House Committee on Finance, which  was on an oversight visit to the commission, became  necessary as a result of poor implementation of the capital budget  by ministries, departments and agencies ( MDAs) of the federal government.
The chairman of the committee, Hon. Abdulmumini Jibrin noted that it was unacceptable for the  Ministry of Finance to consistently give the  economy, a clean bill of health and yet  withhold monies meant for capital  allocation.
(Represented by Hon. Abdul’ Rahman Terab, Jibrin asked that if the economy was robust, why is the government unable  to finance capital budget?
He directed the RMAFC to “put more searchlight on generating agencies. If we must get ready to cope with the current predicament of dwindling oil revenue, we must be serious about holding generating institutions accountable as we drum it to the government on the need to diversify  the economy by discouraging over reliance  on oil revenue”.
He assured the commission that the committee would strengthen  its operations through necessary amendments to the  establishment Act in order to grant it the powers to  prosecute  offending institutions as well as tiers of government who misapply the accruals from the federation account.
In his submission, the chairman of the commission, Mr. Elias Mbam, appealed to the Committee to review its budgetary  allocation, which he argued was low.
He also  requested that the commission should be put on a first line charge to enhance internal determination of budgetary  provision for effective service delivery to the nation “Our capital allocations over the years have been grossly inadequate.
The commission desires the enabling law to implement punitive measures. We are a toothless bulldog.  We can  only look, but we can’t  bite. We want a situation where the commission is empowered to enforce compliance from erring institutions and  even tiers  of government”, he said.
Out of the N3,060 billion   accruing to the  commission, only N939. 1 million has been released from January to September. Out of this amount, N322.1 is for overhead costs.
Also, from the N1.1Billion meant for capital allocation, the sum of N464 million has been released with some outstanding arrears.