By Yahaya Umar
World Bank may not grant Nigeria’s $10.4m loan over the audit report submitted for verification, which did not meet the requisite international auditing standards, the lender said.
This was contained in the World Bank’s June 2025 restructuring paper addressed to the Federal Ministry of Finance ,FMF. The $10.4m is part of the $103m fiscal governance and institutions project ,FGIP.
FGIP is a World Bank-supported initiative aimed at strengthening public finance management in Nigeria, particularly at the federal level.
It was by the World Bank in 2018, and financing agreements were signed in 2019. FGIP is expected to end on June 30.
The document said, “The FMF has requested cancellation of $0.9 million of unused funds for Technical Assistance ,TA, and $9.5m, which is the amount allocated to 10 performance-based conditions ,PBCs, that will not be achieved by the close of the project on June 30, 2025”, the document reads.
“These intermediate results ,IRs, to be implemented by the OAuGF were assessed as not achieved by the independent verification agent ,IVA, because the reports submitted for verification did not meet the requisite international auditing standards.
“Deployment of a National Budget Portal to publish the capital budgets of the FGN and at least 20 states by the BOF, with an allocation of $1m. The BOF did not submit evidence of achievement for the IR.
“Implementation of the Revenue Assurance and Billing System ,RABS, with an allocation of $4.5m.
Two IRs—2.5 and 2.6—were submitted for verification but were assessed in IVA report 6 as “not achieved”.
The report said only 27 out of the 55 Federal Government Owned Entities ,FGOEs, had set up a TSA sub-account for foreign revenues, and there was no system in place to automatically transfer these revenues to the Consolidated Revenue Fund as required.
It said, “This was because there was evidence for only 27 out of the 55 FGOEs setting up a Treasury Single Account ,TSA, sub-account for foreign-earned revenues, and there was no automatic split and transfer of foreign-earned revenues to the Consolidated Revenue Fund ,CRF, as required.
“The remaining IRs 2.7-2.9 will not be achieved before the project closes because of delays due to: (i) Contract management issues: the FMF is in the process of expanding the RABS implementation consortium to include another vendor; (ii) pending finalisation of the indemnity letter requested by the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, from the FMF to ensure that the CBN is not liable for any potential errors arising from the automatic transfers of funds from the TSA sub-accounts of FGOEs to the CRF.
“Given these delays, RABS implementation is expected to be completed in August 2025, which will be after FGIP closes”.
