MARCEL MBAMALU
At first glance, a new Auditor-General’s report in 2026 might appear to examine recent spending. Instead, the 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance and Internal Control Weaknesses, submitted on 17 July 2026, covers the 2024 financial year and includes findings from earlier transactions, including 2023.
The pattern is older: the 2020 report was submitted in December 2023, while the House received the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the 2021 audit in June 2026. By then, officials may have left, records become harder to retrieve and institutions may still be contesting queries.
In August 2024, the Senate PAC reported that FIRS, NNPCL, police and others had repeatedly failed to answer 2019 queries. In all, the rea question is where are the money and the answers years after they are flagged?
Join our WhatsApp ChannelUnder Section 85(5) of the Constitution, the Auditor-General’s report must be considered by the Public Accounts Committee. The Public Accounts Committee Act gives the committee powers to require books, documents and other records and obtain evidence, and requires it, within six months after a matter is referred to it, to prepare and submit its report.
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Even the committee has expressed concern and frustration over the backlog. In February, Bamidele Salam, chairman of the House Public Accounts Committee, said that when the current committee took office in 2023, the most recent audit report before it was the 2019 report. The committee subsequently obtained the 2020, 2021 and 2022 reports, but, as Salam put it, “it’s still not good enough because it’s 2026.”
The pattern becomes harder to dismiss when the same institutions keep appearing in successive reports over similar weaknesses: For instance, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited has repeatedly featured in the audit record. The 2019 report queried N663.89 billion that auditors said was not accounted for in NNPC’s remittances, about 107.2 million barrels of crude lifted for domestic consumption for which adequate accounting was unavailable, and petroleum products worth N7.06 billion reportedly pumped to two depots but not received there.
In March 2021, the Senate Public Accounts Committee summoned NNPC over another query alleging non-remittance of N4.07 trillion between 2010 and 2016 and sustained a query involving an alleged unauthorised N1.5 trillion deduction from the Federation Account.
The 2021 operations report, published as the 2022 Annual Report on Non-Compliance, identified 28 financial irregularities at NNPCL involving N30.1 billion, $51.6 million, £14.3 million and €5.17 million. The findings covered undocumented payments, unauthorised virements, procurement breaches, tax issues and weak internal controls. The Auditor-General recommended recovery and sanctions, but the public record does not show whether those recommendations have been fully implemented.
The more recent audit record has not brought the questions to an end. The Auditor-General’s 2023 report found that NNPCL owed the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority N162.46 billion, as part of a combined N392.73 billion owed by NNPCL and other oil companies. The 2024 audit report subsequently put outstanding liabilities owed to the authority at N432.07 billion, but specifically excluded NNPCL’s indebtedness from that figure. The House Public Accounts Committee opened an investigation in September 2026, with some of the obligations dating back to 2017.
The latest parliamentary action has also brought an earlier NNPCL audit query back into focus. The House committee is due to question NNPCL officials over about N514 billion in alleged financial infractions contained in the Auditor-General’s 2021 report.
The queries include N343.64 billion in alleged irregular deductions from domestic crude oil sales, N83.66 billion allegedly retained in a sinking fund, N82.95 billion in alleged unauthorised deductions from Federation revenue and N3.75 billion flagged over a shortfall from the sale of petroleum products.
The Central Bank of Nigeria also presents a long trail of audit questions. The 2019 audit found that the CBN recorded no recovered funds between 2016 and 2019, despite public announcements of recovered funds. The 2020 audit questioned the handling of a $3.4 billion emergency loan obtained during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It found that $2.4 billion was transferred to the CBN’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, while the remaining $1 billion went to its account at the Bank of China in Shanghai. By June 2020, the funds had been moved to the Bank for International Settlements and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China for short-term investments.
The 2021 audit questioned a N17.1 trillion negative cash balance in the Consolidated Revenue Fund and other government accounts. The Accountant-General’s Office attributed part of the discrepancy to the way the CBN treated interest on Ways and Means advances and argued that the bank should refund N2.73 trillion.
The 2022 audit raised further questions, including N1.413 trillion in outstanding revenue or debt that the CBN had failed to recover, N1.445 trillion in operating surplus that it had not remitted to the Consolidated Revenue Fund and another N1.445 trillion in internally generated revenue. It also found that CBN branches recirculated N29.77 billion in banknotes already classified as unfit for circulation.
The 2023 audit raised more questions. It identified more than N1.25 trillion in unrecovered CBN intervention loans to state governments, N116.18 billion in loans to distressed and liquidated banks and N262.86 billion disbursed under the Anchor Borrowers’ Programme. The report also contained a finding involving $6.23 million linked to a purported request for election funding.
The CBN, the institution at the centre of Nigeria’s monetary and financial system and custodian of the country’s reserves, has itself repeatedly featured in audit findings involving billions of naira and millions of dollars. What, then, should Nigerians expect from other government institutions?
FIRS has similarly faced recurring audit questions. Its 2019 audit identified N138.5 million in payments without supporting documents, alongside queries over tax deductions, staff advances, meeting expenditure and payments to professional bodies, some of which received no response. Its 2021 audit identified billions of naira in unrecovered taxes, including N43.1 billion in infractions in Abuja, N4.13 billion at one tax office, N5.97 billion at another, N11.3 billion at the Garki Large Tax Office and N6.1 billion owed by 168 companies. The Nigeria Police Force provides another example. The 2019 audit reported that 178,459 firearms could not be accounted for, including 88,078 AK-47 rifles, and identified N3.22 billion in inadequately accounted-for expenditure.
Customs provides a different example. In June 2026, the Senate Public Accounts Committee vacated a N62.2 billion under-remittance query from the 2019 audit report after Comptroller-General Bashir Adeniyi explained that the amount comprised levies collected on behalf of other government agencies and was therefore not due to the Federation Account. The committee later set up a smaller panel to reconcile the remaining 76 queries from the 2019 and 2020 audit reports.
If a query is cleared, what evidence established that the money was never due to the Federation Account? With the remaining 76 queries under reconciliation, how many have since been resolved, what evidence settled them and what action followed?
At which point will repeated appearances stop looking like unrelated administrative mistakes.
Another problem is timing since audit queries have taken years to reach the point where officials must answer for them. By then, those who approved the transactions may have left office and even begun heading to other offices. The NNPC case illustrates this. Mele Kyari left as GCEO in April 2025, but in March 2026 the Senate summoned him and other former officials over alleged discrepancies in NNPCL’s audited financial statements covering 2017 to 2023. This shows that delay makes responsibility harder to establish.
Who bears the loss?
The figures in an Auditor-General’s report can look distant from everyday life: N82.9 billion in one query, N3.45 billion in another and billions more in questioned expenditure. But the money is not abstract. It is the money available to build classrooms, equip hospitals, maintain roads, support security and fund social programmes. Citizens are required to account for their obligations to the state through taxes and compliance with regulations. Government institutions entrusted with those resources must also account for how the money was received, authorised, spent and recorded.
An audit finding identifies a failure, breach or weakness; it does not by itself recover money or establish responsibility. That requires records, explanations and a decision on the finding. When that process takes years, records become harder to retrieve and officials move on. Recovery becomes harder, responsibility becomes harder to establish, and questionable expenditure can remain unresolved while government continues spending elsewhere. The cost is ultimately public. Every naira that cannot be properly accounted for is a naira whose use cannot be confidently traced to a public purpose. Where money is not recovered when it should be, the loss is not merely an accounting entry; it reduces resources available for services Nigerians depend on.
Now that the audit of 2023 transactions was released in 2026, when should Nigerians expect the reports covering 2025 and 2026? Is it when the officials responsible for answering them have also left office?
Dr. Marcel Mbamalu is a distinguished communication scholar, journalist, and entrepreneur with three decades of experience in the media industry. He holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and serves as the publisher of Prime Business Africa, a renowned multimedia news platform catering to Nigeria and Africa's socio-economic needs.
Dr. Mbamalu's journalism career spans over two decades, during which he honed his skills at The Guardian Newspaper, rising to the position of senior editor. Notably, between 2018 and 2023, he collaborated with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Northeast Nigeria, training senior journalists on conflict reporting and health journalism.
Dr. Mbamalu's expertise has earned him international recognition. He was the sole African representative at the 2023 Jefferson Fellowship program, participating in a study tour of the United States and Asia (Japan and Hong Kong) on inclusion, income gaps, and migration issues.
In 2020, he was part of a global media team that covered the United States presidential election.
Dr. Mbamalu has attended prestigious media trainings, including the Bloomberg Financial Journalism Training and the Reuters/AfDB Training on "Effective Coverage of Infrastructural Development in Africa."
As a columnist for The Punch Newspaper, with insightful articles published in other prominent Nigerian dailies, including ThisDay, Leadership, The Sun, and The Guardian, Dr. Mbamalu regularly provides in-depth analysis on socio-political and economic issues.
