There is a familiar ritual in Nigeria’s public finance system. The government appropriates money, ministries and agencies spend it, accountants prepare the records, auditors examine the transactions, queries are raised, and reports are eventually presented. The machinery of accountability appears to be functioning. Yet, when the next audit cycle arrives, many of the same weaknesses return: unsupported payments, procurement breaches, unretired advances, weak internal controls, poor documentation and failures to comply with established financial procedures.
This is the uncomfortable significance of the 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance/Internal Control Weaknesses of the Auditor-General for the Federation. The report documents a wide range of weaknesses across federal institutions, covering procurement, payments, internal controls, contract management, advances and other aspects of public financial management. Recent reporting on the report has put the value of the identified financial irregularities and related lapses at more than ₦1.34 trillion. That figure is important, but it needs to be understood correctly: an audit finding or irregularity is not automatically evidence that the entire amount was stolen or lost. It is evidence requiring explanation, verification, corrective action and, where appropriate, recovery or further investigation.
The more fundamental question, therefore, is not simply how much the Auditor-General has found. It is what the Nigerian state does after the Auditor-General has found it.
That is where the audit conversation should begin.
The starting point for thinking about public-sector audit should be a basic principle of public administration: public money is held in trust for the public. Government officials do not exercise unrestricted ownership over public resources. They exercise delegated authority, subject to constitutional provisions, legislation, regulations, budgets, procurement rules and financial controls.
Those rules are not bureaucratic inconveniences. They are the institutional safeguards through which society attempts to constrain discretion, prevent abuse and ensure that public resources are used for authorised purposes and intended outcomes.
The second principle follows from the first: public expenditure must be capable of being explained, verified and accounted for. A legitimate expenditure should leave an evidence trail, from appropriation and procurement through authorisation, payment, delivery, verification and accounting. Internal controls exist to make that chain reliable; external audit exists, among other purposes, to independently test whether the chain is working.
The third principle is therefore crucial: audit is not the end of accountability. It is one of the mechanisms through which accountability begins.
The Lima Declaration, the foundational international statement on supreme audit institutions, describes audit as an essential part of public financial administration whose purpose includes revealing deviations from accepted standards early enough to permit corrective action, establish responsibility, obtain compensation where appropriate and prevent similar breaches.
This principle changes how we should read an audit report. Its value cannot be measured simply by the number of irregularities identified or the monetary value attached to them. The ultimate test is whether the information generated by the audit produces correction, consequence and institutional learning.
The report is telling us something about the control environment. The 2024 report contains examples that demonstrate why this is more than a story about individual transactions.
At the Code of Conduct Tribunal, for example, the Auditor-General identified contracts whose procurement records had not been transmitted to the Bureau of Public Procurement as required, alongside payments that had not undergone the prescribed pre-payment audit. The report attributed the anomalies to weaknesses in internal controls and recommended recovery, remittance and appropriate sanctions.
At the FCT Judicial Service Committee, the report identified contracts awarded to non-accredited manufacturers, irregularities in contract awards and deficiencies in the procurement process for renovation contracts. In some cases, management did not respond to the audit observations, leaving the findings valid pending implementation of the recommendations.
Another finding concerned ₦88.52 million in administrative advances at the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Social Development, with the auditors identifying weaknesses in the control process and risks including payment for work not done and diversion of public funds.
These examples should not be collapsed into one accusation. They involve different institutions, transactions and circumstances. But collectively they point towards a deeper institutional question: how effective are the preventive and detective controls within the public expenditure system?
If the same categories of weakness appear repeatedly across institutions, the policy response cannot be limited to identifying individual infractions after the money has moved. The state must also examine the systems, incentives, authorisations and supervisory arrangements that allowed the irregularity to occur.
That is the difference between auditing transactions and auditing systems.
This connects directly with the arguments I have made in previous Policy & Reform columns.
In “Broken Rule in Nigeria’s Governance Playbook,” I examined the gap between statutory requirements and their enforcement. The central concern was not the absence of rules but the weakening of rules when violations do not reliably produce consequences.
In “The Numbers Don’t Add Up,” I examined the broader problem of fiscal transparency and the importance of credible, timely information for citizens and institutions attempting to follow public resources. And in “The Reform Numbers: Following the Money,” I argued that publishing fiscal figures is only the beginning; accountability requires the ability to connect resources to their allocation, expenditure and eventual public outcomes. The latest audit report brings these strands together.
Transparency tells us what the government says happened. Audit tests whether financial rules and controls were followed. Accountability determines what happens when they are not. Reform asks what must change so that the same failure is less likely to recur.
The weakness in Nigeria is often found in the space between these stages.
An audit query can be issued without a satisfactory response. A response can be provided without effective correction. A finding can be confirmed without timely recovery. A recovery can occur without anyone examining the system that produced the loss. And a report can be tabled before the legislature without citizens ever knowing what happened to the recommendations. That is not an audit problem alone. It is an accountability-chain problem.
This is why recent engagements around federal audit reform are particularly relevant.
In February 2026, the Centre for Social Justice presented the Audit Opportunities Assessment Study, which I worked with their team to research and author, alongside a policy brief on reforming Nigeria’s federal audit system. The engagement brought together stakeholders from the Office of the Auditor-General for the Federation, the Fiscal Responsibility Commission, MDAs, civil society and the media.
One of the study’s central propositions is stark: Nigeria’s audit system produces reports but does not reliably produce accountability. That finding is particularly relevant when read alongside the 2024 Auditor-General’s report. The problem is not that Nigeria lacks evidence of weaknesses in public financial management. The problem is the conversion of evidence into action.
The Federal Audit Service Bill has consequently become an important part of the reform conversation. The Bill seeks to modernise the federal audit framework, establish a Federal Audit Service and Audit Board, and strengthen the institutional framework within which the Auditor-General operates. Civil-society organisations have also called for presidential assent, arguing that the present framework requires significant modernisation.
As of July 2026, reporting indicated that the Bill had been passed by both chambers of the National Assembly and remained awaiting presidential action. But legislation, important as it is, cannot by itself produce accountability.
A stronger audit institution needs equally serious follow-through by Public Accounts Committees, accounting officers, internal audit functions, investigative bodies and the executive institutions responsible for implementing recommendations. Otherwise, Nigeria risks strengthening the capacity to identify problems without strengthening the capacity to resolve them.
The ultimate purpose of a functioning audit system should be institutional learning. Suppose auditors repeatedly find payments without adequate supporting documentation. The response should not indefinitely be another query. The government should ask whether payment controls, segregation of duties, pre-payment audit and supervisory review are functioning properly.
If agencies repeatedly fail to remit revenues, the state should examine the revenue-management architecture rather than treating each breach as an isolated administrative failure. If procurement irregularities recur, the question should extend beyond the particular contract to the institutional incentives and controls governing procurement. This is what distinguishes transactional accountability from institutional accountability.
The reform challenge, therefore, is to build a credible chain from finding to response, from response to resolution, from resolution to consequence, and from consequence to institutional learning.
Every significant audit finding should have an identifiable institutional owner, a defined response period and a clear status. Findings should be capable of being tracked through explanation, correction, recovery, referral or closure. Public Accounts Committees should be able to see which recommendations remain outstanding. Citizens should not have to wait for another annual report to discover whether the previous year’s findings were acted upon. Most importantly, recurring findings should trigger system-level review. This would transform the audit from a periodic post-mortem into a continuous governance feedback mechanism.
The temptation when an audit report is released is to focus on the headline figure. That is understandable. But the more consequential story lies beneath the number.
How many findings will receive satisfactory explanations? Where financial liability is established, how much will be recovered? Which recommendations will be implemented? Which responsible institutions will correct their systems? And when the Auditor-General publishes the next report, how many of today’s recurring weaknesses will have disappeared? The success of public-sector audit should not ultimately be measured by how many irregularities auditors discover. It should be measured by how effectively the state learns from them.
The challenge is therefore no longer simply to find the leak. It is to stop the leak, recover what is recoverable, fix the system that allowed it, and ensure that the same leak does not appear in the next audit report. That is the real promise of audit reform, which is where accountability begins.
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John Onyeukwu, is a lawyer and public policy analyst with interdisciplinary expertise in law, governance, and institutional reform. He holds an LL.B (Hons) from Obafemi Awolowo University, an LL.M from the University of Lagos, and dual master’s degrees in Public Policy from the University of York and Central European University. He also earned a Mini-MBA. John has managed development projects on governance, public finance, civic engagement, and service delivery. He can be reached on john@apexlegal.com.ng
