TheCable

The Chartered Institute of Treasury Management (CITM) says there are no “safeguards” in the treasury single account (TSA) policy of the federal government to prevent compromise. 

Olumide Adedoyin, registrar of the institute, said this on Wednesday while briefing journalists at the national assembly in Abuja.

The TSA is the operation of a unified structure of government bank accounts in a single account or a group of linked accounts for all receipts and payments.

Adedoyin said the “backend” of the TSA is not secured and could lead to “haemorrhaging of resources”.

“Now, the first step the government was supposed to take was to do what we call cash pulling — call up your resources from every bank into one single account. Once you do so, those bank accounts you have should not be closed down, rather you try to moderate them into receiving banks,” he said.

“They receive on your behalf, but you cannot disburse from those banks while at the end of the day, you just have an online real-time balance to make sure that what comes in is being accounted for. That was supposed to be the function.

“But what we discovered at the end of the day was that there are some little processes and challenges within that platform because the backend of the audit was not adequately secured. So if you did not secure the backend, despite being able to make resources and bring those resources, then there is a little bit of opening in the back that could lead to haemorrhaging of resources and so on.”

Adedoyin said the institute has reached out to the government through several means on the need to correct the loopholes in the TSA, adding that “there must be an orientation of the continuous training and retraining of individuals. 

“You would be surprised that some that are saddled with these responsibilities do not actually understand the process effectively,” he added.

“The problem as it is that there are no safeguards in place. We talked about preventive mechanisms that it is lacking. We talked about allowing treasury management to impact your cash management processes — that too is lacking. So these are those fundamental areas that we are concerned about.

Adedoyin’s position is coming a month after Hayatu Ahmed, chief superintendent of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), explained how Ahmed Idris, suspended accountant-general of the federation, diverted public funds by compromising government account systems.

According to him, the systems include the TSA, the government integrated financial management information system (GIFMIS) and the integrated payroll and personnel information system (IPPIS).

Meanwhile, the federal government had inaugurated a presidential steering committee to review government account systems, including the TSA.