Audited, queried, forgotten: Nigeria’s billion-naira audit circus

What is the point of auditing public money if nobody pays for the missing money?

In July 2026, Nigeria received another Auditor-General’s report. It should have been about 2026. It was not. The 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance and Internal Control Weaknesses, submitted on July 17, 2026, covers the 2024 financial year but drags in transactions from 2023.

That is now the system. The 2020 audit report was submitted in December 2023. The House only received the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the 2021 audit in June 2026. By then, the men who spent the money had left office. Files have disappeared. Memories have faded. And the queries remain on paper.

In August 2024, the Senate Public Accounts Committee reported that FIRS, NNPC, police and others repeatedly failed to answer 2019 queries — five years later. The real question, therefore, is no longer what the Auditor-General found. It is: where is the money and where are the answers, years after?

The law is clear. Section 85(5) of the Constitution says the Auditor-General’s report must be considered by the Public Accounts Committee. The Public Accounts Committee Act empowers the committee to demand books, documents and evidence, and mandates it to submit its report within six months of referral.

That law is being breached. Even the committee itself is frustrated. In February this year, the Chairman, House PAC, Hon. Bamidele Salam, admitted that when his committee took office in 2023, the most recent audit report before it was the 2019 report. It later scrambled for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 reports. His verdict: “It’s still not good enough because it’s 2026.”

But the greater scandal is not the delay. It is the repetition. The same institutions. The same weaknesses. Year after year.

Take NNPCL.

In 2019, auditors queried N663.89bn unaccounted for in remittances, about 107.2 million barrels of crude lifted for domestic consumption with no adequate accounting, and petroleum products worth N7.06bn pumped to two depots but never received there.

In March 2021, Senate PAC summoned NNPC over alleged non-remittance of N4.07tn between 2010 and 2016, and sustained a query on an alleged unauthorised N1.5tn deduction from the Federation Account.

The 2021 operations report, published as the 2022 Non-Compliance Report, listed 28 financial irregularities at NNPCL involving N30.1bn, $51.6m, £14.3m and €5.17m — undocumented payments, unauthorised virements, procurement breaches, tax issues and collapsed internal controls. The Auditor-General recommended recovery and sanctions. There is no public record that it happened.

It gets worse. The 2023 audit found NNPCL owed the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority N162.46bn, part of a combined N392.73bn owed by NNPCL and other oil companies. The 2024 audit put outstanding liabilities to the authority at N432.07bn, but curiously excluded NNPC’s indebtedness from that figure. In September 2026, the House PAC opened an investigation, with some obligations dating back to 2017.

And now, an old ghost has returned. The House committee is set to grill NNPCL over N514bn alleged infractions in the 2021 report — N343.64bn in irregular deductions from domestic crude sales, N83.66bn allegedly retained in a sinking fund, N82.95 bn in unauthorised deductions from federation revenue, and N3.75bn shortfall from sale of petroleum products.

If NNPCL, Nigeria’s cash cow, cannot account, what should we expect from others?

The Central Bank presents its own ledger of embarrassments. The 2019 audit found the CBN recorded no recovered funds between 2016 and 2019, despite public announcements of recoveries. The 2020 audit questioned a $3.4 billion COVID-19 emergency loan. $2.4 billion was transferred to the CBN’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, while $1 billion went to its account at the Bank of China, Shanghai. By June 2020, both were moved to the Bank for International Settlements and ICBC for short-term investments.

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The 2021 audit queried a N17.1tn negative balance in the Consolidated Revenue Fund. The Accountant-General blamed CBN’s treatment of Ways and Means interest and demanded a N2.73tn refund.

The 2022 audit flagged N1.413tn in unrecovered revenue/debt, N1.445tn operating surplus not remitted to the Consolidated Revenue Fund, another N1.445tn in IGR not accounted for, and N29.77bn in banknotes classified as unfit but recirculated by CBN branches.

The 2023 audit listed over N1.25tn in unrecovered intervention loans to states, N116.18bn in loans to distressed and liquidated banks, N262.86bn under Anchor Borrowers’, and $6.23 million linked to a purported election funding request.

The custodian of the nation’s reserves, itself repeatedly flagged for billions in questionable transactions — what signal does that send?

FIRS is no different. In 2019, N138.5m in payments without supporting documents, plus queries on tax deductions, advances and professional body payments. In 2021, billions in unrecovered taxes — N43.1bn in infractions in Abuja, N4.13bn in one tax office, N5.97bn in another, N11.3bn at Garki Large Tax Office, and N6.1bn owed by 168 companies.

The Police: A 2019 audit reported 178,459 firearms unaccounted for, including 88,078 AK-47 rifles, plus N3.22bn inadequately accounted for.

Customs shows how queries die quietly. In June 2026, Senate PAC vacated a N62.2bn under-remittance query from 2019 after Comptroller-General Bashir Adeniyi argued it was levies collected for other agencies, not the Federation Account. The committee then set up a smaller panel to reconcile 76 remaining queries from 2019 and 2020.

But questions remain: If a query is cleared, what evidence proved the money was never due to the Federation? With 76 queries under reconciliation, how many are resolved, with what evidence, and what sanction followed?

At some point, repeated appearances stop looking like administrative mistakes. They look like a system.

The second problem is timing. Audit queries take years to reach the point where men must answer. By then, they have moved on — sometimes to higher office. Mele Kyari left as GCEO in April 2025, but in March 2026, the Senate summoned him and other former officials over alleged discrepancies in NNPCL audited statements covering 2017 to 2023. The delay makes responsibility impossible to pin down.

So who bears the loss?

N82.9bn here, N3.45bn there — they look like figures on paper. They are not. They are classrooms not built, hospitals not equipped, roads not maintained, guns not bought, grants not paid. Citizens are compelled to account to the state for every tax and levy. Institutions entrusted with that money must account for how it was received, authorised, spent and recorded.

An audit finding is not recovery. It only identifies failure. Recovery requires records, explanation and decision. When that takes three, four, five years, records vanish, officials move on, and recovery dies. The cost is public. Every naira not properly accounted for is a naira not traced to a public purpose. Where money is not recovered, the loss is not an accounting entry. It is service denied.

Now that the audit of 2023 transactions was released in 2026, when should Nigerians expect reports for 2025 and 2026? When the men who should answer have also retired to Dubai?