MDAs Padded  Budgets With N400bn Duplicated Projects  – ICPC

Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs of the Federal Government  have been accused of padding the 2021 and 2022  budgets with duplicated projects worth N400billion  .
The accusation  was made by the  Independent Corrupt Practices Commission and Other Related Offences Commission, ICPC yesterday  during an interactive session   organised by the Senate Committee on Finance with MDAs on the 2023-2025 Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper, MTEF-FSP.
According to the anti-graft agency, the MDAs inserted duplicated projects worth N300billion into the N13.59trillion 2021 budget alone while they also padded the N17.12trillion 2022 budget with N100billion.
ICPC Chairman, Prof. Bolaji Owasanoye,i n his presentation at the interactive session further disclosed that  another N49.9billion was tracked as salary for ghost workers between January and June this year.
According to him, the N300billion duplicated projects in the 2021 budget and N100billion in the 2022 budget were tracked through scrutinization carried out on approved projects for the various MDAs.
His words “N300billion would have been wasted by the Federal government on duplicated projects inserted into the 2021 budget and N100billion for same purpose in the current fiscal year if not tracked and intercepted by ICPC.
“The same preemptive move , saved the country from spending N49.9billion for salaries of ghost workers put on fictitious pay roll by the fraudulent MDAs between January and June this year.
“Names of MDAs involved in projects duplications running into intercepted billions of Naira and fictitious pay rolls , are available and will be forwarded to the committee.
“The good thing about the preemptive moves made by us is that monies for the fraudulent acts were prevented from being released to the affected MDAs and it is gratifying that the Finance Ministry and Accountant General Office cooperated with us.”
Owasanoye advised relevant committees of the National Assembly to be on the look out for such projects duplication in the proposed N19.76trillion 2023 budget.
“From our own end, detection of such projects are done by verifying their locations and names, upon which we tell the appropriate authorities not to release wrongly budgeted monies for them,” he added.
Impressed by the submission, chairman of the committee, Senator Solomon Adeola (APC Lagos West), said the operational cost of the agency will be increased from N1.8billion.

By: Nneka Amaechi-Nnadi, Abuja