Group Tasks Civil Societies On Public Accounting

The Executive Director, Niger Delta Budget Monitoring Group, (NDEBUMOG) George-Hill Anthony, has called on civil society groups working on fiscal governance and accountability, to build capacity in understanding the International Public Sector Accounting Standard (IPSAS) package, if the war against corruption must be won.

Anthony stated that civil society groups, working in the area of transparency, could not track public spending, retirements and audits because they have limited understanding of how IPSAS truly works.

In a statement made available to The Guardian, the group noted that while many developed countries were already deploying IPSAS, Nigeria is still lagging behind.

“Corruption is deep in our society and the fight against the scourge would not be defeated, if stakeholders, who are supposed to know how the fiscal chain mechanics works, through using new fiscal methodologies, do not take these new accounting evolutions seriously. Corruption is holding trillions of allocations to the Niger Delta down, including Nigeria as a whole!”

Stressing that President Buhari’s success or failure shall be judged by the way his government tackles corruption, the body argued that the amount meant for building of new prisons in the 2016 Federal Budget Proposal might convey a message of government intends to tackle corruption.