The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Representatives has directed the Federal Fire Service (FFS) to refund the sum of N1.48bn met for COVID-19 intervention.
The Green Chamber gave the FFS one week period to make the refund.
It stated that the FFS cannot account for the intervention funds it received for the COVID-19 health epidemic in 2020.
The directive was issued by the Bamidele Salam-led committee on Wednesday following the failure of the service to appear at the investigative hearing for the third time.
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Deputy Chairman of the committee, Jeremiah Umar, moved a motion for the refund of the amount on Wednesday’s hearing.
Umar said:
“So many other agencies have appeared before this committee, and the investigation is ongoing. I don’t see any reason why (sic) the fire service will ignore a committee like this.”
He stressed that since the service could not appear before the lawmakers to clear the controversies surrounding its COVID-19 expenditure, the right thing to do is to refund the sum of N1.48bn it collected.
The committee also issued fresh invitations to some other defaulting Ministries Departments and Agencies of the Federal Government to appear and explain various queries standing against them from the office of the Auditor General of the Federation on the billions of naira allocated as COVID-19 an intervention funds.
Those invited are the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security -N50.5bn, Office of the Accountant General of the Federation- N33bn, Federal Ministry of Women Affairs, through the National Centre for Women Development-N625 million, National Centre for Disease Control-N25bn, and the Federal Ministry of Health- N10bn.
