FIJ
Betta Edu, suspended Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation, was revealed in a leaked document to have received N3 billion in COVID-19 funds for the auditing of the National Social Register (NSR).
The NSR is the responsibility of the National Safety Net Coordinating Office (NASSO), and it is an aggregation of state registers built by each of the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. It is used to determine the eligibility of citizens for social programmes.
Edu’s request, which was granted by Femi Gbajabiamila, Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu, on September 23, has met with a lot of criticism from Nigerians on X, with most claiming that the amount was outrageous for the intended purpose.
Some Nigerians, however, think the amount was appropriate for the intended use. Ayekoto, an X user, said that the amount allocated to audit the NSR was not out of place as the exercise involved 11 million households across the country and this could be done at N273 per household or N48 per verified individual.
Meanwhile, Uncle Taiwo, another X user, argued that while data verification might be expensive, the allocated amount was outrageous and could not be justified.
EXPERTS SPEAK
FIJ spoke with auditors and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) officers who have worked on social registers to determine how much it could cost to verify the NSR.
Olufemi Osuntokun, an M&E officer, stated that auditing 40 million names does not imply that every single name will be verified because of the statistical standards available to simplify data gathering.
He added that this also means that the amount dedicated for the purpose is outrageous.
“Auditing 40 million names does not mean verifying every name. There are statistical standards that let you use stratified random sample or choose the best sampling method,” he told FIJ.
“When you select records from a data set, you want to verify if those people exist, have relocated or are dead, and the cost of data quality assessments is always a fraction of the cost of the intervention.
“Data quality assessments should not be up to five percent of the cost of intervention; N3 billion is outrageous.”
A chartered accountant who spoke anonymously said that the cost of verifying the NSR at the most should not exceed N100 million, considering that they might be verifying small payments to beneficiaries.
“While the cost of auditing is based on the art and power of negotiation, the NSR can still be verified with about N10 million,” he said.
“However, because a government agency is involved, it is being inflated ridiculously to reflect their individual padding and share. At the worst of it, the price should not exceed N100 million.”
