The Oyo state House of Assembly has considered the 2021, 2022 reports of the Auditors-general and financial statement of accounts of the 33 local government area in the state.
The house, through its Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chaired by Honorable Olorunpoto Rahaman, member representing Oyo East, Oyo West State Constituency called for strict compliance with the financial memoranda.
The exercise which started on Monday ended on Friday with the 33 local government areas appearing before the committee.
While speaking with journalists on Friday, the chairman of the committee, Honourable Olorunpoto Rahaman said the committee has been less than impressed with Internally Generated Revenue of the local government areas.
Rahaman noted that the appropriation issue will be sorted by the House committees on Public Accounts, Finance and Appropriations and the Minsitry of Local Government.
His words: “Regarding the IGR, we have been less than impressed. I know that things could be much better. We will be making recommendations to the government on how they can block leakages in revenue, we realized that they are a lot of leakages and there could be a lot of improvement.
“Regarding the issues with the appropriation, yes, the Public Accounts Committee together with the Committee on Finance and Appropriations will settle the issues there with the Minsitry of Local Government.”
The lawmaker also called for training and retraining of the local government staff adding that there were a lot of avoidable errors in the documents submitted to the committee. He also stressed the need to go digital.
He said: “We have observed that the are a lot of gaps between expectations and reality in the aspect of capacity of the people in charge. We believe that things should be much better. There a lot of errors in their papers, avoidable errors. So we believe that there’s is a need for capacity development, there’s a need for training and retraining, ICT Empowerment in our local government level.
“We have dealt with more than 500 documents hard copies in the last 5 days. This is not something that should continue. Our shelves are already filled up with documents, so we want to see how we can get them to go Digital. When they go Digital with documentation, they should also go digital with IGR collections, so we will be able to block leakages.
“We will recommend to the House of Assembly to allow the House Committee on Public Accounts and House Committee on Local Government to call the leadership of the local government and have a joint discussion.
“After the discussion on the gaps that we observed, we can now initiate the process of training and we will need lots of compliance with the financial memoranda. We need to do training with the dictate of the financial memoranda. I think that’s the main aspect we have to work.”
