Director, Treasury Single Account Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation, Sylva Okolieaboh on Monday said the Federal Government is currently saving an estimated N45 billion monthly on interests through the implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA).
This was as he also hinted that the government had achieved almost a 100 per cent compliance of the scheme in all its Ministries, Agencies and Departments.
The Director stated that it was on the basis of Nigeria’s high score that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently advised the Government of The Gambia to understudy the country’s implementation model that led its TSA success story.
Speaking at a joint interactive briefing in with payment System Stakeholders and officials of the Government of The Gambia who are in Nigeria to understudy the TSA at Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) premises in Lagos, Okolieaboh said that in ways and means charges; Nigeria has been able to keep track of government’s cash resources as there is now better coordination between monetary and fiscal policies, while foreign reserves have improved, with inflation under control.
He added: “In a challenging environment like Nigeria, we succeeded in bringing every MDA and funds of the Federal Government; budgetary, extra-budgetary, regardless of location into the Treasury Single Account. All enrolments were done in less than four weeks. By so doing, we have significantly improved liquidity of government; we save over N45 billion monthly in ways and means charges.”
Speaking on the areas that needed to be improvement on TSA, he said there is a room for improvement in the areas of foreign currency, foreign exchange and foreign missions.
Said he: “We are extending TSA to our foreign missions and we need to also improve the way we manage foreign currency inside the TSA, that process has actually started and we expect that in the next three to four months, we should be done with it.”
On the success of TSA in Nigeria, Okolieaboh explained that, “Africans discovered that we have made a lot of progress in our TSa and IMF advised Government of The Gambia to come to Nigeria to understudy how Nigeria has been able to do it.
For the past two weeks, we have been with them and we have been sharing experience with them and we decided to bring them to Lagos to meet with the key players in the payment system sector.
Ethiopia and Kenya have also indicated interest in the TSA.”
Meanwhile, Accountant General of the Republic of The Gambia, Momodu Lamin Bash, said that his team is in Nigeria to understudy the TSA. “We are here in Nigeria to understudy the success of TSA that has been implemented over the past years and we also had a literature from International Monetary Fund (IMF) and they have also used Nigeria as a case study on their capacity building.
So we decided to come to Nigeria to learn from the country’s approach and also from the success and the challenges they faced, where are the pitfalls, where we should be careful, where we should avoid and where we should be focused more so that we will be better prepared to implement our own TSA.
Source: The Sun
