2016 Budget: More controversy as auditor-general disagrees with Buhari

– The controversy over the 2016 budget gets messier as more revelations keep unfolding

– The auditor general of the federation has contradicted claims by President Buhari that the budget was zero based

– The AGF told the Senate that the budget was the traditional envelope budgeting system

Samuel Ukura, the auditor general of the federation (AGF) shocked the Senate yesterday, February 18, when he said the 2016 budget was not zero based but envelope driven.

This is contrary to what President Muhammadu Buhari told a joint session of the National Assembly on December 22 last year, that the template adopted for the details of the N6.08 trillion budget estimates was zero-based budgeting.

Speaking before the Senate committee on public accounts, at the budget defence session of his office, Ukura explained that the earlier intention of the present government was to adopt zero based budgeting as a template, but they were later forced by the realities on the ground to adopt the usual enveloped based budgeting, The Nation reports.

READ ALSO: What NASS and FEC are planning to correct the 2016 budget

According to him, the N2.9 billion budget proposal for his office was not arrived at through zero budgeting but handed over to his office as an envelope by the Ministry of Finance.

He said: “Budgets of all Ministries, Departments and Agencies of government this year are all enveloped based and not zero-based as it has been the case over the years, including that of my office, which is even largely done for us by the supervising ministry.”

Explaining further, he said that the zero-based budgeting makes no assumption that such expenditure exists but rather, you start from zero and justify why that expenditure must be used.

“So, it is a system which is good and which would have also helped to set targets, but that wasn’t applied at the end of the day, perhaps because it was hurriedly being introduced,” he said.

Members of the committee were not satisfied with the presentation and performance of the AGF in office.

READ ALSO: Sacking officers not enough, present another budget – Fayose

The 2016 budget has triggered a lot of controversy after it was presented to the National Assembly in December 2015. In January, reports surfaced that the budget was missing but that was cleared up later. Now the Senate has said the budget is full of errors and can not be passed in February as earlier promised.

Some ministers have complained about how the budgets of their ministries were messed up.

The inflated figures, errors and inconsistencies in the budget have been blamed on a ‘budget mafia‘ in the budget office.

The post 2016 Budget: More controversy as auditor-general disagrees with Buhari appeared first on Nigeria News today & Breaking news | Read on NAIJ.COM.