Senate queries DPR over N44bn remittance

Officials of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) were on Friday queried by the Senate on Friday for remitting only N44.5 billion into the Consolidated Revenue Fund in 2019 out of N2.4 trillion generated.

This is as heads of many of the other revenue generating agencies invited by the Senate’s Joint Committee on Finance and National Planning for Interactive Sessions on their 2021 revenues projections, refused to appear.

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, Solomon Adeola, queried the remittance when the joint committee demanded for records of the agency’s internally generated revenues in 2019 and projections for 2021.

“Information and records presented to us by both directors or heads of departments that have spoken are not clear and insufficient as regards budget performance of DPR within the last three years and revenue projection for 2021.

“For this committee to do a proper and thorough job, comprehensive records of such budget performances must be made available latest by Monday upon which your director and other top management staff will appear before us again on Tuesday.

“Also, well detailed proposals for revenues generation by the agency for 2021-2022 must be included in the expected comprehensive records,” Mr Adeola said.

Earlier, Head of Planning of the agency, Johnson Ajewole, who first spoke in the absence of the Director, Sarki Auwalu, said N2.4 trillion was generated by DPR in 2019 but N44.5 billion was remitted into the Consolidated Revenue Fund.

Efforts made by the Head of Finance and Accounts of the Petroleum agency, Lilian Ufondu to explain the wide gap in revenues and remittance, further angered the committee members.

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She said out of the N2.4 trillion generated by DPR in 2019, N88 billion was removed as four per cent collection fee out of which N5.72 billion was also remitted while the balance was used for overhead.

Persistent questions to her by the committee chairman and members on what happened to the more than N2 trillion balance were not satisfactorily answered as she was only able to mention overhead and operational costs without specific figures tied to them.

She added that as of July this year, DPR had generated N1.13 trillion and projecting N3.4 trillion as revenues generation for 2021 out which N139 billion would be taken out as four per cent collection fee.

Like DPR, heads of other agencies such as Nigeria Inland Waterways (NIWA), Bank of Industries (BOI) and Standard Organisation of Nigeria (SON), were also not present for the interactive session and were accordingly ordered by the committee to reappear on Monday.