ReportsNG
The Federal Medical Centre, Abeokuta, Ogun State, failed to remit ₦5,496,793.20 in employees’ pension contributions to the appropriate Pension Fund Administrators, documents obtained by ReportsNG show.
The deductions were made from staff salaries, the money left workers’ pay but it never reached the pension funds it was meant for. That is a breach of the Pension Reform Act, which requires every employer to remit deducted pension contributions promptly on behalf of its staff.
The failure has consequences that go beyond accounting. Pension contributions are deducted at source precisely so that they cannot be diverted or delayed. When an employer holds onto them, the affected staff are the ones who lose: their retirement savings do not grow as they should, and the contributions that should be earning returns sit instead in the institution’s accounts. For the workers of FMC Abeokuta, the deduction was real, the remittance was not.
There is also a question of trust. Staff have no way of knowing, from their payslips alone, whether the money deducted for their pension actually reached their Pension Fund Administrator. They rely on their employer to do what the law requires. When that trust is broken, it is usually discovered years later at retirement, when there is no time left to correct it.
A second finding concerns ₦2,400,000.00 in payments that carried no relevant supporting documents. Under Paragraph 603(i) of the Financial Regulations 2009, every voucher must contain full particulars of the service rendered, backed by documents sufficient to allow the payment to be independently checked. In this case, there was nothing to check the document could not establish what the ₦2.4 million was spent on.
The requirement for supporting documents is not bureaucratic. Without them, there is no way to confirm that a payment was for a genuine service, that the price was fair, or that the money did not simply disappear. The document’s inability to account for ₦2.4 million is the direct result of records that should have existed and did not.
The identity of the Chief Medical Director who led the Federal Medical Centre, Abeokuta, during the audited 2022 financial year could not be independently confirmed from public records reviewed for this report.
Paragraph 3106 of the Financial Regulations 2009, covering irregular payment, and the Pension Reform Act’s remittance obligations apply to these findings.
The Medical Director is directed to account for each sum before the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee, recover and remit the amounts to the Treasury, and forward evidence of that remittance. The two findings together total ₦7,896,793.20 for the 2022 financial year.
