By Secrets Reporters
Imprest is one of the oldest mechanisms in public finance. Money is released in advance to an officer to cover a specific, immediate expense travel, field operations, small purchases. The officer spends it, then “retires” the imprest by submitting receipts, vouchers and a statement of what the money was used for. Any balance is returned.
The system works because the retirement closes the loop. Money goes out, an accounting comes back, and the balance is reconciled. Without that final step, an imprest is simply cash handed to an individual with no proof of where it went.
Three imprests totalling ₦4,890,000.00, granted to staff of the National Board for Arabic and Islamic Studies (NBAIS), Kaduna, across departments and zones, showed no evidence of retirement. Paragraphs 1011(i), 1405 and 1420(i) of the Financial Regulations 2009 govern how imprests must be granted, applied and accounted for. None of that was documented.
What “No Evidence of Retirement” Means
It means the review could not establish what the ₦4,890,000.00 was spent on. There were no receipts to check, no vouchers to test, no returned balance to confirm. From the records available, the money went out and nothing came back neither an accounting for it nor the unspent portion.
The sums involved are not trivial, and they were spread across different departments and zones. That spread matters. A single unretired imprest might be explained as an oversight by one officer. Three, across separate parts of the Board, point to something more structural: a process in which retirement was not enforced, followed up, or treated as a condition of future releases.
Two risks follow, both identified in the financial review. The first is loss of government funds money spent without any record of what it purchased. The second is diversion of public funds. An unretired imprest is the easiest possible vehicle for moving money without a trail: no receipts, no vouchers, no reconciliation. Once the cash is released, there is nothing left to trace it by. Management’s Response recorded in the review is not a detailed defence. It reads “[We] accept the Board’s assurances that all imprest and advances have been cleared and taken up.”
That is not an accounting. It is one party recording that another party gave assurances. The financial review asked for evidence of retirement. What it received was a statement that assurances exist. An assurance is not a receipt and it does not tell the auditor what the ₦4,890,000.00 was spent on, when, or by whom.
The underlying principle is simple and long-established: public money released in advance must be accounted for afterwards, or returned. Three imprests across different departments and zones, none of them retired, suggests the breakdown was not confined to one desk or one officer. It suggests a system where retirement was treated as optional and where, as a result, nearly ₦4.9 million in public money remains unaccounted for.
