Government institutions and agencies spent N1,006,542,151,109.36 with total disregard to appropriation bills.
The Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP) has accused no fewer than 84 ministries, departments and agencies of spending above the overhead cost budget in 2019 without providing evidence of where and how they sourced the excessive funds.
The civic group made this allegation in a tweet released on Monday, maintaining that these government institutions spent N1,006,542,151,109.36 with total disregard to appropriation bills.
“84 ministries, departments and agencies [MDAs] in 2019 exceeded their Overhead Cost budget by N1,006,542,151,109.36 but failed to disclose the sources of the extra spending and failed to provide evidence of supplementary appropriation,” SERAP tweeted.
In similar events, Nigerian legislative arm, the National Assembly has been found to have inserted projects worth N1.8 trillion in the 2021 and 2022 budgets.
This discovery was made by a citizen engagement platform BudgIT after its research on budget performance.
According to its policy paper, the initial 2021 appropriation bill presented by the Presidency had 13,416 capital projects, but when passed, it had risen to 19,017 projects. The value of these 5,601 additional projects sums up to N913.15 billion, which is 21.8% of the total capital expenditure for the year.
