The Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) on Monday urged the Federal Government to implement its Oil and Gas Industry Audit report recommendations
Mrs Zainab Ahmed, NEITI’s Executive Secretary, made the call at a Public Enlightenment Workshop on Oil and Gas Industry Audit for the Year 2012, organised by the body in Lagos.
Ahmed attributed the controversy surrounding the 20 billion dollars oil money to the failure of the Federal Government to adhere to NEITI’s earlier recommendations.
She said that the recommendation would have saved government the embarrassment and controversy.
“If fully the recommendations that have been made by NEITI in its previous report were fully implemented, a lot of things would have been resolved now.
“Now that the citizens are pushing for immediate answer, we would have had a better stage of account.
“But now we cannot say whether the money is correct or not until it is fully audited,” she said.
Ahmed said that the purpose of the workshop was to expose the oil and gas industries and government agencies on what they needed to do to support the audit process.
“This audit template workshop is part of NEITI’s public education and enlightenment specifically targeted at relevant government agencies and companies expected to be covered by the audit exercise.
“The audit template is a set of questions designed in questionnaire format which NEITI’s team of auditors will expect answers to be provided by entities covered in the audit exercise.”
Ahmed said that the forum was to put other partners such as the media and civil society on notice about the commencement of the audit and to track the progress of the exercise.
She also said that the audit would establish the quantities of hydrocarbons produced, exported or imported and how the licensing process and agreements were reached and implemented between government and the companies.
“The exercise will cover key areas such as mapping of hydrocarbon flows, volumetric analysis and technical assessment of hydrocarbon streams and examination of procedural systems,” she said.
Mr Ledum Mitee, the Chairman of NEITI , said that audit reports contained credible data and information on the production figures, payments received and amounts due to the federation account for the period covered.
“Granted that by the very nature of our processes, these audits are historical and thus unable to clear the current allegations by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).
“But we have consistently made the point that with adequate funding and support, we could automate our data collection processes to enable us get real time data which could be restored to in the event of controversy.”