By Godfrey AKON
The Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs Zainab Ahmed, has said her ministry, in collaboration with Office of the Accountant General of the Federation, OAGF, has recovered N53.5 billion debt owed the Federal Government.
Ahmed, who stated this at the launch of the Project Light House Debt Analytics and Reporting, in Abuja, said the recovery was made within the last 12-18 months, through the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System, GIFMIS, as a recovery touch point.
According to her, the ministry through the consolidation efforts of the Project Light-House has been able to aggregate monumental debts of approximately N5.2 trillion owed the Federal Government.
She said these debts came to the spotlight from data aggregated from over 5,000 debtors across ten ministries, departments and agencies, MDAs.
A statement by the director of information and press in the ministry, Phil Abiawume-Mowete, quoted the minister as explaining that Project Light-House is a data driven artificial intelligence engine that provides the ministry with an intelligence and profiling platform to aid in policy formulation, implementation and assessing the impacts of those policies.
She added that it would support MDAs in developing a more efficient revenue assessment methodology by ensuring that major revenue loopholes are plugged and revenue collection is dramatically improved.
According to her, Project Light House is a platform for debt recovery and the aggregation of data from key resources to provide the ministry and all revenue agencies under the ministry with the capabilities to generate useful and insightful information for a more efficient and intelligent data-driven revenue mobilization.
She stated that the benefits of the Project Light House will provide an analytic view of revenue performance support to agencies of the ministry as well as other arms of government at federal and state levels.
Speaking earlier, the permanent secretary of the ministry, Aliyu Ahmed, said that upon assumption of office, there was urgent need to critically look at ways of addressing the “revenue loopholes” across the public financial management space which threatened to impede the efforts of the present administration to deliver on the promises of job and wealth creation, infrastructural development, social and economic development etc.
Aliyu said that a review of significant revenue leakages in government was carried out by the ministry which revealed that there were companies and individuals who owed government agencies, running into trillions of naira, and have refused to honour their obligations and were still transacting businesses with government.
These firms according to him are still being paid especially through the government platforms such as GIFMIS and Treasury Single Account, TSA.
“This was only possible due to lack of inter-agency collaboration required to give visibility over these transactions” adding that Consolidated Platform for the Recovery of Government Debts under its technology infrastructure –Project Light House was initiated in a bid to help the Federal Government realize revenue due to the Federal Government.
