Concerning the arrest of the Accountant-General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris who was nabbed by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC for allegedly siphoning over ₦80,000,000,000 (eighty billion naira), the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has reiterated that the arrest has gone a long way to buttress its notion that IPPIS is fraud.
The union said this while reacting to Idris’s arrest over alleged money laundering and diversion of N80bn.
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ASUU President, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, speaking with Newsmen warned that the case should not be covered up, stating that IPPIS is just a fraud used by the Accountant-General to siphon funds and not control corruption.
He said: “We have said it over and over again that IPPIS is a fraud. We’ve also said that the Accountant-General office is a fraud, and they are using IPPIS to relocate all the fraud activities to one centre, which is the Accountant-General Office and we have been vindicated. That’s our position.”
Osodeke demanded that the EFCC should take the Accountant-General to court, adding that “corrupt persons deserve punishment in line with Buhari’s administration’s vision.
“This IPPIS, I can tell you as we speak, that many of our members have not been paid for 13 months, 8 months, 9 months, but they’re telling the government that they are using it to control corruption.”
The Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has also urged the EFCC to also beam its searchlight on the administration of Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS, managed by the embattled AGF.
Chairperson of ASUU, Federal University Otuoke, FUO, Bayelsa State, Dr. Socrates Ebo, who made the call in a statement in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, while reacting to the arrest of the AGF, said it was no longer news that both the Auditor-General of the Federation and the Head of Service had separately decried the corruption in IPPIS.
His words: “Since the deployment of the payment platform, no lecturer can say for certain what his salary is. They deduct what they like from the salary and pay what they like to whom they like.
“It had been severally alleged that the payment platform sometimes generates ‘audio’ personnel on the payroll. Someone who could allegedly pilfer N80 billion from public coffers cannot possibly pay Nigerian workers their due salaries with sincerity.
“The AGF is the manager of the IPPIS. EFCC should extend its searchlight to the administration of the payment platform. I believe it will make interesting finds.”
