The finding is contained in the 2024 Annual Report on Non-Compliance and Internal Control Weaknesses in federal ministries, departments and agencies. Eight separate audit queries at the National Cash Transfer Office in Abuja were raised, each involving billions of naira in unverified transactions.
Chira’s office said the paid vouchers for the N33.751bn did not carry full beneficiary details. The Remita statement, which would have matched payments against names on the National Social Register and National Beneficiary Register, was not made available to auditors.
“All efforts to obtain access to the Remita statement were obstructed and denied by NTCO accounts staff, thereby frustrating the audit process,” the report said. The Auditor-General identified payments to fictitious or ineligible persons as a direct risk.
No response to the query was submitted by NTCO management. Chira recommended that the National Programme Manager appear before the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committees and provide evidence that beneficiaries actually received the funds. Any amount that cannot be accounted for, the report said, should be recovered and returned to the Treasury.
Beyond the N33.75bn, a second query covered N36.744bn in payments made without prepayment audit. December 2023 saw 215 payment vouchers processed and paid without any internal audit checks, the report confirmed. Post-payment reviews replaced the required pre-checks, a reversal of procedure that auditors said exposed public funds to misapplication.
A third query found that 101 payments totalling N4.616bn from the office’s cash book were made without the paid vouchers being presented for audit examination at all. Auditors identified diversion of public funds as a risk and recommended recovery to the Treasury.
Disbursements to state coordinators also came under scrutiny. Payments totalling N3.09bn were made to various states for enrolling unbanked beneficiaries, but documents covering only N2.74bn across 34 states were provided, leaving N350.18m unaccounted for with no beneficiary lists, photographs, attendance registers or enrolment reports attached to the vouchers.
Nine State Cash Transfer Units returned a combined N393.71m, telling the NTCO that insecurity and disasters prevented enrolment exercises. Yet no documents confirming the money was credited to the Consolidated Revenue Fund were presented, and no evidence showed that the affected states later completed those exercises.
A N280.42m mobilisation advance to Payment Service Providers, representing 30 per cent of a contract value, was paid without an Advance Payment Guarantee. No pre-qualification documents, bidding records or technical and financial evaluations were found in the service providers’ files, the report noted, raising the risk of payment for jobs not done.
Store items worth N89.51m purchased by the NTCO were never entered in its store ledger. The office had not updated that ledger since 2020. N17.42m in diesel expenditure was also disbursed to staff as cash advances rather than through contract awards, a method the auditors said breached the N200,000 procurement threshold and cost the government an estimated N2.18m in foregone taxes.
This is not the first time the cash transfer programme has attracted financial scrutiny. In December 2023, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission uncovered an alleged N37.1bn fraud in the Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs under former Minister Sadiya Umar-Farouq. Her successor, Betta Edu, was suspended in January 2024 after authorising a N585m transfer into a private account.
The EFCC confirmed recovery of about N32.7bn and $445,000 linked to those cases. Halima Shehu, who coordinated the National Social Investment Programme Agency, was separately arrested after allegedly moving N44bn from agency accounts to suspicious destinations.
Nigeria has drawn down approximately $744.61m of an $800m World Bank social safety-net loan approved in December 2021 to fund these cash transfers. In 2025, the World Bank said the programme reached only 37 per cent of its targeted households, as millions of Nigerians who needed the relief did not receive it. The latest audit now raises the question of where the money that was transferred actually went.
