Naijaonpoint
Across two previous reports titled; “UNILAG VC Folasade Ogunsola Paid N7 Billion On Contracts Executed So Irregularly Auditors Could Not Verify The Work” and “UNILAG VC Folasade Tolulope Ogunsola Hid N7.8 Billion Worth of Contracts From Nigeria’s Open Contracting Portal; Failed To Remit N3.89 Billion IGR To Gov’t Purse“, SecretsReporters exposed how the University of Lagos hid N7.83 billion in contracts from public view, failed to remit N3.69 billion in collected revenue, and paid out N7 billion on contract work its own auditors could not verify was properly executed.
This report covers more findings that detailed a cluster of cash advance, staff payment and basic internal control failures that complete the picture of an institution whose financial discipline broke down at nearly every level.
N434,785,669.00 sits as unretired cash advances – money handed out to staff and officials that was never accounted for or returned. N397,501,351.78 was paid irregularly to staff, outside the university’s approved pay structures. N355,607,021.23 in payments carried no relevant supporting documents at all. N178,022,070.52 was paid to staff as unapproved allowances. N121,709,504.79 in store items were never taken on ledger charge, meaning goods procured with public funds were never properly logged into the university’s inventory system. N116,374,844.25 in payments violated the Federal Government’s e-payment policy and N82,925,572.49 in cash advances were granted above the approved limit.
Beyond these figures, the audit recorded further findings without an isolated financial figure extractable from the text: unaccounted withdrawals from university accounts, a further round of unapproved staff allowances, unaccounted payments of travel grants, unsubstantiated withdrawal of funds, and payment for international travel without approval which is five additional categories of control failure layered on top of the sums already documented.
Professor Folasade Tolulope Ogunsola has served as UNILAG’s Vice-Chancellor throughout the entire financial year the audit examines, and continues in the role today. As the university’s chief executive and accounting officer, she bears direct responsibility for every finding across all three parts of this investigative series.
Cash advances that are never retired, staff payments that bypass approved structures, and store items that vanish from the inventory ledger are not sophisticated financial engineering but basic administrative failures that any functioning internal audit unit is designed to catch before they compound into hundreds of millions of naira. That they instead surfaced through a federal audit, at the scale seen, points to internal controls that were not operating as intended anywhere in the university’s finance function.
The Financial Regulations 2009 require prompt retirement of every cash advance which was violated by N434.79 million left unretired, and by N82.93 million granted above the approved limit in the first place. The same regulations require full supporting documentation for every payment violated by N355.61 million with none on file, and proper ledger accounting for every procured good violated by N121.71 million in unlogged store items. And the Federal Government’s e-payment policy, designed to keep every disbursement traceable, was violated by N116.37 million in non-compliant payments.
Source: …Secretsreporters