Senate Probes N1.7trn Service Wide Votes Between 2017-2021

Senate has instituted a probe into how Federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs of the federal government utilised over N1.7 trillion Service Wide Votes allocation that were disbursed to them in the 2017-2021 budgets. The Senate is carrying out this holistic investigation through the Senator Matthew Urhoghide, led Committee on Public Accounts. Speaking in Abuja during the meeting of the Committee, Senator Urhoghide said that Service Wide Votes is a disbursement into shortfall in capital and overheads. He said, “A Service Wide Vote which is also known as the Consolidated Revenue Fund Charge is more or less the country’s contingency fund in the annual budget. It is a huge sum of money which is kept for unforeseen expenditures. The recurrent expenditure part of the fund is what is actually referred to as the SWV, while the capital part of it is called Capital Supplementation. The SWV is domiciled in the Federal Ministry of Finance.” Urhoghide has however ordered the Acting Accountant General of the Federation, Okolieaboh Sylva, who appeared before the Committee, to submit details of disbursement of Service Wide Votes as quickly as possible.

According to him, “We want you to submit details of disbursement of Service Wide Votes, let us have it as quickly as possible, please we want speed. The other one that concerns you is the disbursement of Service Wide Votes from 2017-2021, you have not submitted the 2021 disbursement, let us have that of 2022 as quickly as possible, the reason is because we have 797 agencies to deal with all the letters, we have decided to put them on hold until we get your report of 2021, so that we don’t start writing fresh letters on 2021 again as soon as possible. “We need to input it into our report, let be able to know that you have exercise a level of cooperation with us, give us hard copies for our members to study.

We have to take you first before any other agency, you will have to appear first week of our resumption.”

Speaking further Urhoghide said that the agencies need to explain how the Service Wide Votes collected have been spent, adding that the Committee will need to know who authorised the disbursement of funds from Service Wide Votes, who applied for it, the authority to incure the expenditure and the supporting documents. He said that for the first time, the Senate is making inquisition into Service Wide Votes. It will be recalled that Urhoghide, had complained about the SWV noting that they (his committee) had yet to find out how disbursement for SWV both recurrent and capital expenditure are being utilised.between

According to the lawmaker, his Committee has made several attempts in the past years to ensure that heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) give account of what they got from the SWV, but all efforts have been futile.