COVID-19 daily payment is missing on the FG’s Open Treasury Portal The documents were initially uploaded on the portal, questioning the portal’s integrity and the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007. An official at the Accountant General’s office says the portal had faced downtime from GalaxyBackbone, resulting in missing data.
Apart from inadequate information, missing documents and deleted items have trailed FG’s open treasury portal, findings by Dataphyte revealed.
This action is a violation of the guidelines on the financial transparency policy. The policy was in fulfilment of President Muhammadu Buhari’s promise on building public trust in Government.
It also violated Section 48 (1), Party XI of the Fiscal Responsibility Act, 2007. The act states that:
“The Federal Government shall ensure that its fiscal and financial affairs are conducted in a transparent manner, and accordingly ensure full and timely disclosure and wide publication of all transactions and decisions involving public revenues and expenditures and their implications for its finances”.
In December 2019, the Federal Government launched the Open Treasury Portal. The portal mandates all government parastatals to publish transactions above ₦5 million. Being a government mandate, most MDAs comply, albeit half-hearted, as incomplete records are the order of the day.
In the last two years, Dataphyte had reported how Ministries, Departments, Agencies (MDAs) negate the open treasury portal’s guiding principles by uploading inadequate data and such lacking description.
The crux of the matter: a trend of missing data
The data for COVID-19 monthly payments have gone missing on the open treasury portal in the last three months. The portal monitored between November 2020 to February 09, 2021, by Dataphyte showed the Accountant General’s office allegedly removed vital information after various stories by Dataphyte on loopholes.
Specifically, COVID-19 Daily Treasury Statement from April 2020 to September 2020 returned an error message.
“Oops… Page Not Found! We’re sorry, but the page you were looking for doesn’t exist,” the error message reads.
Further checks also revealed that the Accountant General’s office is yet to start inputting Monthly budget performance reports, fiscal accounts, quarterly fiscal accounts, and quarterly financial statements (MDAs). According to the financial transparency policy, the coverage and publication of those treasury accounts ought to have started since 2018.
After growing calls, the Accountant General denied any knowledge of the portal’s information, despite explicit responsibility placed on the office by Section 4.1 of the Financial Transparency Policy & Implementation Guidelines, 2019.
In May 2020, the Human and Environmental Development Agenda (HEDA) sent FOI to the Accountant General’s office requesting details of the ₦173 Billion payments made between January and April 2020 with no description. The Accountant General shunned the FOI, an act Mr Olanrewaju Suraj, Chairman of HEDA, described as embarrassing and an abuse of civil service rules.
Office of the Accountant General says the portal is having challenges
An official at the Service Desk Department of the Accountant General’s office told Dataphyte that the office is yet to change the portal.
“I knew a while ago, GalaxyBackbone (an enterprise in charge of unified Information and Communication Technology (ICT) of the federal government) had an issue with their system and government portal.
“They promised to restore it, maybe that was the reason for the omission of COVID-19 data.”
However, he had no response when Dataphyte questioned why it had taken the Office of the Accountant General and Galaxy Backbone a long time to re-upload the COVID-19 data.
Moving forward
Ifeoma Onyebuchi, Program officer at Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), lamented on the occurrence of deleted items from the open treasury portal. She further urged stakeholders to look into the issue and check on abuse of transparency policy.
Fiscal transparency is paramount for the government to build trust. It would also strengthen the affairs of the nations and increase the openness of President Muhammadu Buhari-led government.
The Accountant General’s office needs to build capacity in data handling and ensure that officials and MDAs comply with the government’s open transparency guidelines.