Budget defence: Confusion as BPP D-G, Directors can’t remember procurement audit year of MDAs

The House Committee on Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) has queried the agency’s failure to submit 2016-2020 audit reports of Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs) of government.
Nasir Ahmed, the chairman of the committee, raised this during the budget defence by BPP on Thursday in Abuja.
Uju Chima, (APC-Imo), a member of the committee said that the function of BPE include monitoring, surveillance and supervision of agencies of government.
He said that it was a rude shock to the committee to discover that only 32 out of 805 MDAs procurement reports were submitted in the document presented before it.
Irked by the development, the committee mandated the Director-General of BPP, Mr Maman Ahmadu, to submit the audit report from 2016 to 2019 with a deadline of December to do so.
The committee noted that procurement audit was only done for 32 MDAs out of 850 agencies of government, adding that such could not be justified under performance appraisal.
Reacting to the development, Ahmadu said some of the procurement audit had been published, adding that it had submitted the 2016-2017 but had yet to submit that of 2018-2019.
He stated that audit reports of agencies were usually time consuming, stressing that the BPP was making effort to complete the process.
The BPP was, however, not sure of the procurement audit year that had been submitted as confusion ensued among the Directors that accompanied the D-G.
Effort made to confirm the year was abortive.
Aware of move by BPP to confuse the committee with different years being touted, a member of the committee, Osai Osai (PDP-Delta) said the Directors should be put on oath to ensure the truth was told.
The BPP’s 2021 total budget operations is N1.44 billion  while the capital expenditure is N205 million, the overhead is N750 million and personnel is N479 million.