Jigawa, Kaduna and Bauchi States have been ranked highest in the Public Finance Management (PFM) report of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, ICAN’s Accountability Index’s (ICAN-AI) 2021.
The report which was released in Lagos on Monday also ranked Rivers, Sokoto and Oyo as the lowest, occupying the 37th, 36th and 35th positions respectively.
The summary of the ranking for the 2021 ICAN-AI report placed Jigawa (75.1%), Kaduna (74.7%), Bauchi (74.3%), Edo (73.5%) and Niger (64.9%) in the top 5. Osun, Kogi, Gombe, Enugu and Kwara with a score of 59.2%, 57.6%,54.7%,53.5% and 53.1% respectively completed the top 10 list.
Lagos (32.2%), Nasarawa (28.2%), Kano (27.8%), Ogun (27.8%), Bayelsa (27.3%), Zamfara (24.9%), Imo (24.9%), Oyo (24.5%), Sokoto (23.7%) and Rivers (20.4%) were the least ranked.
According to the President of the institute, Tijani Musa Isa, the ICAN-AI Framework consists of 5 pillars, 25 indicators and 70 dimensions aimed at promoting high quality public finance management’s system in Nigeria.
The five pillars for the report are budget credibility, policy-based fiscal strategy and budgeting, external audit and legislative scrutiny, management of assets and debts as well as control in budget execution, accounting and reporting.
Isa, who noted that the first two editions of the report, covering 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, revealed major gaps in Nigeria’s PFM system, especially low level of publicly available information on the fiscal activities of the three tiers of government, said the 2020 and 2021 reports reveal a significant improvement in the percentage of information made available during assessment exercises.
“We are encouraged that the 2020 and 2021 reports reveal a significant improvement in the percentage of information made available during assessment exercises, recording 50% and 53% overall information availability respectively. These percentages are improvements from the 28% and 35% average availability rates in 2018 and 2019, respectively,” he said.
Meanwhile the institute, yesterday, inducted 2014 members as Associate Chartered Accountants bringing the total membership of the Institute to 60,175.
He urged the inductees to maintain high standards of professionalism as wrong, false or mishandled financial information can spell disaster for the economy.
“Our profession is a reputable one. The public, organizations, and government have high regard for Chartered Accountants. We have the unique, albeit delicate privilege to be the custodian of sensitive financial information. This information, if professionally handled, is critical input for charting the growth trajectory of businesses, governments and economies,” he said
