The Director of Banking Services, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Hamisu Abdullahi has said Remita was selected to provide an electronic platform essential for facilitating payments from Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs) to beneficiary accounts across commercial banks.
Abdullahi made this assertion when officials of the apex bank appeared before the House of Representatives Public Accounts Committee Thursday, to respond to queries about Remita’s operation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) platform.
The hearing was presided over by the Chairman of the House Committee on Public Accounts, Bamidele Salaam.
Salaam had said, “The investigation is not a witch-hunt targeting any company but rather a crucial step towards transparency and ensuring accountability for the federation’s revenue”.
According to Abdullahi “The CBN was directed to provide an electronic platform that would facilitate payments on behalf of MDAs to beneficiaries accounts in the commercial banks.
“CBN deemed it fit to source for an alternative way of doing this and engaged two companies and out of the two, Remita, was selected based on merit and based on the fact they had been rendering similar services to commercial banks”.
In a previous report, Salawu Zubairu who was Director of the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation (OAGF) had said that Remita was chosen as the preferred platform to manage the TSA after a rigorous evaluation process that included other candidates like the Nigerian Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS). The selection, steered by a joint evaluation committee’s competitive presentations and deliberations, was based on Remita’s superior capabilities in handling TSA’s electronic payments and collection of government receipts, satisfying all the stringent requirements of the Office of the OAGF, the CBN, and their external consultants.
The Managing Director of Remita Payment Services Limited, Mr. ‘Deremi Atanda, also highlighted the previous system’s shortcomings, where government agencies independently received funds and arbitrarily decided the timing and amount of operating surplus to remit, a practice that has been streamlined by the TSA.
“There has been an evolution and it has been positive for the country on account of TSA. Some things that started manually have now become automated. What MDAs were doing was that they were receiving inflows and at their instance determine what is operating surplus when they remit”, he said.
Mr Atanda said the “TSA initiative is designed to create a single window through which all inflows and outflows of government can be monitored in real-time for transparency and accountability and especially for the effective management of the government’s cash assets”.
The Director-General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms, Dr Dasuki Arabi, had in the past reported that the TSA has been instrumental in uncovering and removing approximately 70,000 non-existent employees from the civil service payroll. The government has realized savings of at least N220 billion through the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS)
Mr Atanda further explained how the government can track and account for every single transaction through a unique Remita Retrieval Reference (RRR) code assigned to each revenue inflow.
