Late Release Of Audit Reports Bad For Nigeria’s Budget Process—Tolbet, Senior Officer IBP

In this interview with THE WHISTLER, the Senior Programme Officer, International Budget Partnership, Sally Tolbet spoke on Nigeria’s latest budget ranking, issues affecting the budgeting process in Nigeria and steps that could be taken by the federal government to make the budget more inclusive. Excerpts…

Nigeria posted its best performance in the Open Budget Survey, improving by 24 points for transparency among the 120 countries surveyed in 2021 but you said there is still room for improvement, what would be your key advice for Nigeria in order to improve on what it has achieved in the budget process?

Nigeria is doing great work in reviewing its budget processes to see what it can disclose and when. And I will say take a look at the achievements they have made so far. Maintaining the start-up is important, if you started publishing a document, continue publishing budget documents. And then, there is some work to be done, in terms of working with the Auditor-General’s office to release the audit report promptly, and that has been delayed and is considered too late within international standards. So, hopefully it can be published faster than it has been in the past.

Nigeria scored 45 in the global budget ranking, does this show that the country has done well in its budget process?

Nigeria currently scores 45 out of 100. We consider 61 to be the level of sufficient budget information so we are hoping to encourage Nigeria to in future rounds and hit that benchmark of 61. So that’s the target that we’re encouraging for now.

How many countries got to this benchmark in terms of country and how many were the countries surveyed in all?

We covered 120 countries, our top performers are Georgia, and other countries that tend to do well include New Zealand and South Africa tend to do well and are at the top of the ranking. There are several countries and in fact, there is a growing number of countries that are very excited to see an increasing number of countries that we’re able to hit and surpass the 61 benchmarks for publishing sufficient budget information.

One of the most important processes in budgeting is in the area of budget implementation, are you currently satisfied with what the government is doing in this area?

In Nigeria, one of the big things that we’ve seen in the past and we’ve heard the Director-General of Budget speak to is the performance of the budget. So, you see that sometimes not all of the cash is being released to the MDAs for them to use and sometimes those MDA’s have trouble using the cash that they receive. So, there’s a number of the budget report that we hope to see that help track and report on the progress on that.

The monthly report that we saw released on time in this round is really good. They can be more done to help better procurement data and budget data so that civil society groups can track procurement processes and see when they’re delayed or what’s happening. And then, there’s also room to strengthen documents. One is the media review when you explain planned adjustment in a budget mid-way through the year, we saw that in 2020 because of covid but that hasn’t been standard practice in the past.

So, we think that the government documenting and explaining changes in a budget during a year is a good place to start talking about some of the challenges they might be facing in implementation and also what they’re doing to overcome that. Then, the final budget implementation report, that’s where the government should be saying ‘this is what we achieved during the year with public funding’ and that document is the one that will release the standard and a lot more details provided about spending at the end of the year.

How does the open budget initiative help government in terms of planning and implementation?

The open budget theory started because civil society was recognizing that government often sees the budget as the preview of only internal discussions and at the same time people were trying to better understand how the fund is been used especially when the Government is saying ‘we’re going to raise taxes or we are going to try to do more domestic resource mobilization.’ Where is that money going? That’s a public discussion and unless people have trust in how that money is been used, people are not going to be willing to give the government more in terms of domestic resources to spend more, to create more space for programs that help poor people.

So, this effort to encourage governments to be much more transparent, much more accountable and much more open to public discussion about the budget decisions made opens up space for people to raise those questions and say these are our priorities, this is what we like you to do with our money and we’re seeing many more governments opening up to that conversation because of the pressure year after year that civil society groups are putting on them.

The data you released on Nigeria is based on a national survey, is it also reflective of the sub-national?

The open budget survey is for comparability purposes so we try to compare. We have a rigorous methodology that allows us to compare across countries this is why we can say that Ghana is doing slightly better than Nigeria on transparency and Sierra-Leone is doing better than Nigeria on public participation. To do that, we looked only at the central government budget and we do not look at the state level. Many countries do assessments to state level transparency and I know in Nigeria there’s been a lot of work done documenting and tracking when the government is publishing information and should be publishing.

You said there’s need to improve the audit of the budget. How can that be effectively done?

Audit is an incredible part of the oversight of the government budget and those audit report is where that is documented. The Auditor General gives the recommendations and findings when they review the government financial statements. So those reports are critical oversight mechanisms for public standing.