Officials at the National Identification and Registration Authority (NIRA) misappropriated Shs23 billion, an internal audit by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning has said.
The revelations are captured in the verification report of funds spent for the registration of learners exercise in the Financial Year 2016/2017.
The December 2017 report shows that Shs23,596,196,719 was misappropriated.
The defalcation a rose from unsupported expenditure, irregular payment to individual person accounts and NIRA staff and irregularities in the procurement of 2,000 laptops and 6,000 batteries, according to a preliminary internal audit report seen by this website.
The audit shows that, besides failure to account for Shs8.7 billion that was irregularly advanced as facilitation for various activities, more billions of shillings were irregularly remitted on personal accounts of NIRA officials.
“For instance, in May and June 2017, funds amounting to Shs1,3397,093,574 were deposited onto the personal account of the accountant,” the audit says.
“There were also huge cash advances to NIRA staff. For example, a one Darius Turyahikayo received a total of Shs489,410,000 in cash from the accountant.”
The report punches holes in irregularities in the procurement of 2,000 laptops and 6,000 batteries in terms of over pricing, leading to a loss of public funds to a tune of Shs2.7 billion.
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NIRA is also faulted for failure to adhere to the delivery and payment terms in the contract since only 2,000 laptops and 350 batteries had been delivered and the delivery of the remaining 5,650 batteries was uncertain, yet the institution paid Shs7.9 billion for the entire procurement on June 30, 2017, three days after the contract was signed yet no delivery had been made.
The registration exercise
Last year, the Ministry of Education and Sports tasked NIRA to undertake a national exercise to register all learners aged between five and 16.
The registration exercise, from May 29 to August 30, aimed at registering a projected 10 million learners in primary and secondary schools as well as post primary technical institutions in the country.
The Registration of Learners’ Project 2017 followed the decision of government made during the retreat of Ministers and Permanent Secretaries at Kyankwanzi in February 2014 to operationalize the idea. The meeting determined that the Education and Sports sector, works towards strengthening of Monitoring and Supervision mechanisms to fight the phenomenon of ghost pupils and students.
It was on those grounds that President Museveni directed that the biometric registration of all pupils and students be undertaken as a way of strengthening supervision of schools, and rationalizing spending so as to save resources that could then be functionalised in other activities in line with the strategic guidelines and directives of the President.
The benefits the registration of learners was to authoritatively identify of students and pupils, ensure effective implementation of capitation grants and, in future the National Identification Numbers be used as index numbers during national examinations
The required human resource established was with a total of 12,000 Enrollment Officers (EOs) and 200 data processing officers recruited at districts to handle the enrolment and data processing processes respectively. Training of the relevant staff was done using the training of trainers approach to ensure speedy skilling and deployment.
