By Gift Samuel, The Sight News
Abuja-The Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) has on Thursday cleared the air on the reason for the delay in the distribution of revenue to the three tiers of government for the month of October 2017, saying that little discrepancies were observed in the reports submitted by the NNPC which led to the suspension of the FAAC to ensure that the figures released are genuine.
It would be recalled that the FAAC had convened on the 23rd of November for its meeting but no resolution was reached as the meeting was postponed.
Meanwhile, the FAAC on Thursday distributed the sum of N532.758 billion to the three tiers of government as revenue for the month of October 2017.
Briefing newsmen after the meeting, the Permanent Secretary in the ministry of Finance, Mahmood Isa Dutse disclosed that the shared amount is N25 billion lower that the N558 billon distributed for September 2017.
He explained that the Distributable Statutory Revenue for the period which is N443.045 billion is slightly above the N423.961 billion that was collected the previous month by N19.084 billion.
The Permanant Secretary noted that out of the N443.045 billion, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation(NNPC), provided N101 billion, DPR N76.965 billion, FIRS oil related revenue N138.6 billion, Non-oil FIRS N66.958 billion and the Nigerian Customs Service came in with N57.853 billion adding that if the cost of collection due to the various agencies is taken out, resulting to a deduction of about N11.7 billion then what is distributable comes to N431.319 billion.
Giving a break down of the Net Statutory Revenue which is N431.319 billion, he stated that the Federal government received N205.7 billion, States N104.3 billion and the Local government areas received N80.437 billion and N40.847 billion went to oil producing states as 13 per cent oil derivatives.
For the Value Added Tax(VAT), collection for the period was slightly higher than the previous month as it came to N89.713 billion and after deducting cost of collection, N86.124 billion was left for distribution from which the Federal government received N12.91billion, States N43.06 and the Local government received N30.144 billion and adding both the statutory collected Revenue and VAT collection brings the total revenue distributable for the month to N532.758 billion
He noted that the balance in the Excess Crude Account (ECA) as at December 7, 2017 is $2.309 billion.
Responding to the cause of the decrease in the total revenue distributable, the Permanent Secretary said that the amount was lower than that collected in October due to the N50.8 billion from the foreign exchange equalisation fund distributed in the previous month was not received in the present month.
Fielding questions from newsmen present, the Chairman, Commissioners Forum, Mahmoud Yunusa explained that the previous meeting was postponed by two weeks following discrepancies noticed from records presented by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
According to him, “We sat down with NNPC and made reconciliation and resolved the problem, we had slight increase and inflow as a result of that reconciliation. It is not a kind of intention to defraud, going forward we will be fully involved in what the NNPC is doing to avoid this kind of avoidable problems. We believe and know that the NNPC will be more careful next time”.
He further stated that State Governors were involved in the reconciliation of the accounts and assured that the discrepancies noticed will not “repeat itself as the states would now be involved in the accounting process.”
