IMF/FAD To Help Nigeria Strengthen Public Finance Management System

A TEAM of experts from the Physical Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)/FAD has arrived Nigeria to assist the country in further strengthening her Public Finance System with a view to reducing waste and curtailing corruption in the system.

The leader of the five-man team and a senior economist from IMF/FAD, Mr. Sailendro Pattanayak disclosed this yesterday when the team paid a courtesy call on the Head of Service (HOS) of the Federation, Wilfred Oyo-Ita in Abuja.

Pattanayak told journalists after a closed door meeting with the HOS that “agreed the government has taken a number of new initiatives to strengthen Public Finance Management in Nigeria, we are here to basically review those initiatives. You can see that already, there are several challenges in the context, so in line with the IMF Physical Affairs Department’s experiences in many other countries, we will be able to provide advise on how to address some of the challenges and to recommend next steps to further strengthen the Public Finance Management system.”

Responding, Oyo-Ita said what the meeting hoped to achieve was to put forward to the Physical Affairs Department of the IMF all programmes of the HOS in line with the improved service delivery in the areas of public finance management.

Oyo-Ita said: “We are looking for a collaboration with them, especially in the area of rolling out our personnel and human resources components of the IPPIS programme. We also believe we will be able to benefit more in the area of capacity building and development for our senior officers.”