The Tertiary Education Trust Fund has accused 36 unnamed tertiary institutions comprising universities, polytechnics and colleges of education of failing to respond to audit queries which were sent to them regarding the 2020 financial year, The PUNCH has gathered.
The audit queries centred on issues bordering on the remittance of taxes and the failure to provide complete bank statements detailing transactions made in the period requested among others.
These were disclosed in the exclusive audit report of the 2020 financial year, which was made available to our correspondent in Abuja on Monday.
The PUNCH reports that TETund, an agency under the Ministry of Education, was established following the deteriorating educational infrastructure and falling standard of education in the 1980s and early 1990s, which led to agitations for reforms in the educational sector.
In response to the agitations which primarily came from the Academic Staff Union of Universities, the Education Tax Fund was established in 1993 under Act No 7 as amended by Act No 40 of 1998 as a trust fund and the 2011 TETFund Establishment Act, to use project management to improve the quality of education in Nigeria.
The main source of income available to the Fund is the two per cent education tax paid from the assessable profit of companies registered in Nigeria.
The Fund administers the tax imposed by the TETFund Act and disburses the amount to tertiary educational institutions at the federal and state levels. It also monitors the projects executed with the funds allocated to the beneficiaries.
The report read in part, “During the period under review, the Fund received a total of 824 financial returns from beneficiary institutions for various intervention lines.
“787 Audit Clearance Certificates were issued; 77 were queried while one is currently under review. Out of the institutions that were queried, 36 are yet to respond.”
Speaking further in the report, the fund noted that “several beneficiary institutions are not adhering to the Fund requirements for financial retirements which as a result cause a delay in issuing Audit Clearance Certificates. Some of the irregularities observed include not providing any of the under-listed documents in their financial retirement submitted to the Fund which are as follows;
“Complete bank statements detailing transactions made in the period requested; e-payment schedules for payment to contractors and suppliers; payment vouchers used to expend money from the project account with photocopies of supporting documents such as Contract Award leers, APGs where applicable, Contractor’s receipts, SRVs etc;
“Monthly bank reconciliation statements; evidence of deduction and remittance of VAT and WHT with receipts from tax authorities and bank statement; some of the financial returns submitted to the unit contain supporting documents that are not relevant to the period under consideration; non-compliance of tax deduction and remittance is one of the most common infractions observed in our beneficiary institutions in their submissions of financial returns to the Fund.
“Delay in delivery of correspondence from TETFund to beneficiary institutions, further leading to a delay in resolving issues about the issuance of audit clearance certificates.”
The TETFund’s Executive Secretary, Sonny Echono, did not respond to inquiries from our correspondent which sought to ask about the identities of the accused institutions, as calls and texts sent to his contact were not answered as of the time of filing this report.
