Nigeria’s federal government on Thursday disclosed that over N10 trillion has been saved since the Treasury Single Account (TSA) was introduced by the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration.
The Director-General of Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), Dr. Dasuki Arabi, who made this known at a news briefing at Abuja, declared that government had succeeded in getting the TSA deployed in all ministries, departments and agencies.
According to him: “Challenges have come in the implementation at the initial stage, but we are overcoming that and government is able to save over N10 trillion over the years because whatever you’re generating now goes into a TSA that is managed by somebody else, not you.
“And government, especially at the top is always able to see what has come into our TSA today and what has gone out of that. So planning has been simplified. Budgeting has been simplified. Our distribution and allocation of resources have been simplified and streamlined.”
Speaking on the performance of the Bureau in the execution of its core mandate particularly in ensuring the full implementation of reform policies and programmes for the government, he said the introduction of Integration Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) led to the reduction of the Federal Civil Service personnel to 720,000.
The IPPIS, the DG further explained, led to the weeding out of about 70,000 ghost workers from the service.
Using video slides to illustrate, Arabi said: “On the next slide, these are some of the benefits that we think government or Nigerians have benefited out of the work that we have been doing in collaboration with other agencies of government, where they with the introduction of IPPIS about 70,000 ghost workers have been eliminated from the payroll.
“We have a one shot opportunity to look at IPPIS and say, as at today, we have 720,000 public servants working for Nigeria.
“This is a great achievement which I think we need to encode and we need to get it celebrated by all of us. We’ve been able to reduce more than N220 billion wastage through wrong management of IPPIS on payroll by ministries, departments and agencies of government. We have reduced the budget deficits and change the budget composition.”
The DG said as part of the reforms in the service, the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIGMIS) had made government business paperless and “it has reduced man to man contact and processing, payments in ministries, departments and agencies of government.”
