Secret Reporters No place to hide
Secret Reporters
In a bid to make Kaduna State a destination of choice and a Geographic serene environment, a law to establish the Kaduna Geographic Information Service (KADGIS) and matters connected therewith, was established December 23rd, 2015, and was enacted by Kaduna State House of Assembly.
The KADGIS Project was meant to be a board responding to the immediate needs of Kaduna indigenes by providing a modern and efficient land administration backed by automated systems with fully trained staff that can produce, secure land titles and increase Internally Generated Revenue (IGR).
Information on SecretReporters news desk revealed that the management of Kaduna State Geographic Information Service (KADGIS) submitted a forged report alongside the audited financial statements for the year, ended December.
In this 21st century, it is so shocking and alarming to know that a state owned Geographic Information Service do not have a database management system for proper documentation as information exclusively sourced by this online news medium indicates that the number of Payment Vouchers for KADGIS were manually generated, and erroneously numbered as expenses were not matched to the period from which they were incurred.
KADGIS SecretReporters learnt uses an extremely poor filing system, as flat files which might not stand the test of time were used in filing confidential documents, in a bid to selfishly embezzle money. In most cases there were no supporting documents for some transactions. Cases like a cash disbursement using Payment Voucher dated 28/01/2016 with the sum of N2,923,600 disbursed on the 13th of July, 2016 and another dated 28/01/2016 with the sum of N2,923,600 disbursed on the 18th of July, 2016 respectively with no proof that such monies were disbursed appropriately goes to show how stealing with pen has become the business of the day within KADGIS.
As a practice in every government organization, the cashbook which contains a record of how every penny spent from the approved budget from government coffers is usually used to crosscheck the payment vouchers (collection of receipts and cheques bearing approval from the directors or assistant directors before any cash is released for any purpose). The cash book and payment vouchers were to serve as a manual database and proper documentation on how funds approved in the budget of KADGIS were utilized, but the reverse is the case as these books now serve as a tool for embezzlement.
Further investigations carried out showed that there were unrecorded transactions for the month of January, 2016 that contained the names of beneficiaries of compensations which were totally removed and replaced with other names that did not appear on the cheques issued out in the payment voucher. There were no updates in the store issues voucher, store receipt vouchers and store ledger. There were also no date and SIV numbers on most of the items issued to various agencies, departments, and offices like the DLA office, DDLA office under store ledger, DAS, SLAR and land registry department.
Similarly on the 10th of July 2016, some expenses were incurred without payment vouchers. These includes transactions with Bipet Nigeria Ltd, with the amount of N3,342,356.50 Napco Nigeria Ltd with the amount of N6,280,151.70 and that of Team2 Associates Ltd with the highest amount of N7,703,217.50, giving the total amount of N17,325,725.70 million embezzled in a single day
Our reporter noted that KADGIS billing department did not provide a billing table to enable auditors ascertain the total amount of bills raised in 2016. In an oral interview with the Deputy Director of finance and the Revenue Officer, both attested to the fact that the bureaucratic bottleneck procedure involved in retrieving the files from the consultants will make it impossible to make the documents available.
It is also pertinent to mention that the Treasury Single Account (TSA) statement was not made available during an audit exercise conducted to ascertain the actual amount of revenue generated by KADGIS in the year 2016.
The figures of the wanton looting is unending with basic salaries for the month of December, 2016 as captured in the trial balance amounting to the sum of N10,486,658.41 while salary schedule revealed the sum of N5,828,858.14 giving a variance of N4,657,800. There were also discrepancies between salaries recorded in the cashbook vis-à-vis payroll journal for the month of January, February, March, April, May, and August 2016, cowing a variance of N39,113,520.79.
Meanwhile an audit report shows that there was no salary recorded in the month of February, March and August 2016 in the cashbook made available to SecretReporters.
Furthermore, the bank tellers used for issuance of receipts during the period under review were not provided for the audit exercise. The investigations made by SecretReporters shows that receipt booklets were not serially used, receipt number 4190942, 4190945, 4190430 and 4190431 were arbitrarily issued. In the document in our possession, receipt S/N 4251894 dated 01/03/2016 had the sum of N20,000 while in the cashbook under cash was recorded N20,000 and that of bank N2,000. Our independent findings revealed that some of the receipts were canceled, but yet still recorded in the cashbook. Receipt number 00898218 dated 29/09/2016 with N50,000 was doubled and recorded as N100,000.
There were receipts that ran into millions, such as receipt number 00896317 with the sum of N138,278,32 dated 31/05/2016 was recorded as N183,278,32 in the cashbook. Receipt number 00898940 with the sum of N202,913,04 which dated 31/10/2016 was recorded in the cashbook as N102,913,04.
The total revenue generated for the year 2016, as per cashbook amounted to N1,002,804,543.06 billion which as per revenue schedule revealed N1,025,149,938.34 giving a whooping variance of N22,345,395.28 million naira as a total amount of N8,215,827.29 was discovered missing in the revenue book of account.
In the course of this investigation, SecretReporters discovered that the management in connivance with their internal auditors and accountants (finance department in general) cook up figures in most cases where a grand cover-up is needed just to have something to show. The documents made available to our reporter served as the bedrock or evidence that there were question marks, as to how the monies approved in their financial year’s budget were used.
Sources within KADGIS disclosed that the management shares huge amount of money to members of their families yearly to run their personal business, according to a proposed format and forged record to show how they used the money, in order to cover up their misappropriation.
