The Role of Financial Control Institutions in Promoting Financial Accountability in the Public Sector
ABSTRACT
Financial matters are so important that they receive constitutional recognition. To avoid abuse, the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, provides a series of checks and balances over public finance by sharing financial responsibilities among the Executive, the legislature and the Office of the Auditor-General.
The research sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the checks and balances on public finance in Plateau State.
The research also set out to recommend measures that will enhance the discharge of financial accountability. In this research, four hypotheses were formulated and tested.
The primary data was obtained through the administration of questionnaires, interviews, and actual observation. This was supplemented with secondary data.
The technique of simple random sampling was used in the questionnaire administration. The population of the study was 386 out of which a sample of 160 was studied.
The chi-square (χ2) test statistics were used to test the four hypotheses. Percentage analysis was used to investigate issues considered relevant to this research but were not covered by the hypotheses.
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Nigeria, a federation of thirty-six States and Seven Hundred and seventy-four local governments, was a colony of Britain but became an independent State in 1960.
It has a population of nearly one hundred and twenty million people and the dominant source of income is oil (Oladosu and Oyelakin 2003:1).
Nigeria has been divided into six geo-political zones – South-South, South-West, South-East, North-East, North-West, and North-Central.
Plateau State falls within the geo-political zone of North-Central. The State was first created as Benue-Plateau in 1967. It later became Plateau State with the creation of Benue State in 1976.
Nassarawa State was also created out of Plateau State in 1996. The Nigerian public sector consists of the governments at the Federal, State, Federal Capital Territory, Local Governments, and all government parastatals.
The public sector plays an important role in economic development. It provides services that the private sector may not be willing or able to provide.
Chan (1988:15) argues that the public sector provides many essential services to society. It plays an essentially compensatory function; that is, it performs those functions that the market economy does not do efficiently or lacks the incentive to do at all.
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CSN Team.
