Abdulrasheed Bawa, the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has disclosed that the anti-graft agency last week recovered over N1 billion cash sitting in one bank account belonging to a civil servant.
The EFCC boss made the disclosure when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance investigating the Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, and payment of 1% stamp duty by contractors on all contracts awarded by MDAs between 2014 and 2020.
According to Bawa, there are lots of leakages in the system that need to be blocked.
He said “After observing the proceedings and the process of investigation of the Committee, I am happy with what is happening here. It is a good development that the committee is working towards blocking revenue leakages. At this point in the nation’s history, it is not much about generating revenue as much as blocking leakages of revenue generated and still being generated by all these agencies of government”.
Bawa said he would have been happy to go away with one of the heads of agencies immediately from the revelations that the Committee unearthed in course of scrutinising the documents presented by the agency stressing that he would be ready to partner with the committee as the process goes on and hopefully get the report of the committee for further action.
As part of his efforts to block leakages, Bawa said since his assumption of office, he has created 4 new departments in EFCC, two of which are namely the Procurement Department and the Internal Audit Department.
He said this is to ensure that due process is followed and that there are no audit queries along the processes.
He however, added that other MDAs are encouraged to copy the template of EFCC.