The Federal Government announced the approval of an independent audit of payments in the country’s oil and gas industry as well as the solid minerals sectors with the announcement of two consultants – Messrs Sada Idris & Co and Messers Haruna Yahaya & Co – whose audit reports were to cover 2009 to 2011.
It has been found to be another corruption and fraud.
The audit is to cost N364million.
Messrs Sada Idris & Co are to audit the oil and gas sector for N226.613 million while Messers Haruna Yahaya & Co would be paid N137 million for the solid minerals sector.
The two auditors are not big names in the sector got the jobs, a search revealed their websites.
Going through the websites to find out the brains behind the organization revealed high level grammatical and spelling errors that are so confounding.
Once this was pointed out, the brains behind the fraud pulled down the website at about 3pm on Saturday.
Then the questions: who ordered and who is paying for these audits?
While briefing journalists at the end of its weekly Federal Executive Council chaired by President Goodluck Jonathan, the Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, said the firms have nine months to turn in their findings.
Some other reports showed that since Nigeria is part of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the Nigerian arm, NEITI, was credited with the authorship of the report.
NEITI is supposed to aim at increasing transparency in payments to governments from the natural resources industry.
When Maku was speaking, he noted that the appointment of consultants will establish processes and procedures; physical volumes and financial flows from the sectors; improve revenue remittances into the Federal Government account and enthrone competition and corporate governance.
But this is not a deep rooted audit task.
The scope of work the minister described is primarily forensic audit or at best process audit.
Another fault in the minister’s position is in the assertion in some other newspaper reports that the choice of the two audit firms were done in line with the Procurement Act.
This may not be too true.
If the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Dizeani Allison-Madueke, set up her committee on January 16, 2012, then when and how did NEITI enter into the processes and sent same to the Federal Executive Council?
A scan through the Tenders Journal, both the hard copy and the online version, did not show NEITI’s advertisement for the job to have been tendered.
So, when was this job advertised leading to the choice of the two firms announced?
There was a KPMG audit report that lied on the ledgers of the Petroleum minister for more than a year.
KPMG was paid.
Is KPMG not competent to be re-briefed for this new audit?
What is wrong in making KPMG complete what they have started?
Are there some issues to be hidden based on the fact that the KPMG report indicted its paymaster, leading to the appointment of a lesser qualified firm for the new audit?
What ‘big’ job has the new auditors handled before?
Given the quality of errors they have on their websites, which were hurriedly pulled down, another search took The Eagle Online to their Facebook page where it is written: “Haruna Yahaya & Co Chartered Accountant and Tax Practitional” instead of practitioners. It is also a company of Chartered Accountant and not Accountants!
The introduction to one of the company’s websites said: “Sada Idris & Co chattered Accountants is one of the leading medium sized professional Chartered Accountants and Tax Consulting Firm providing first class services.”
So, by the size of the firm, medium sized, by their own admittance, this must be the biggest ever job they are getting.
By deduction, it means the company has never done this kind of jobs before.
So, the conclusion is: it must be a job for the boys.
He said the consultants are to carry out Nigeria’s hydrocarbon and solid mineral values; adding: “They shall access the volumetric aspects of production, export, imports, unaccounted oil and gas and solid minerals and other relevant streams.”
This definitely will overwhelm the firms.
So what does the nation expect?
It would be recalled that President Goodluck Jonathan said last week that he would tackle corruption in the oil and gas industry and prosecute offenders as a week-long strike against a government decision to scrap subsidies on gasoline came to an end.
Allison-Madueke on January promised to end corruption and speed up reforms of the country’s oil industry.
She, with the approval of Jonathan, ordered the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to the disbursement of N1.3 Trillion as petroleum product subsidy.
The last audit of the oil industry was carried out between 2006 and 2008.