The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says the implementation of the federal government’s Treasury Single Account (TSA) is affecting its income generation as it can no longer invest savings to fund budget deficits.
The commission made the assertion in a statement on its website titled ‘The Nexus between SEC and TSA’.
It said that like many other initiatives, TSA came with teething problems, which include adjusting to the new ways and getting the procedures right.
But most disturbing, SEC said, is the “inability of the commission to directly invest its savings as was the practice to generate interest income to fund budget deficits”.
SEC said the TSA would reduce idle cash balances of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) funds in banks.
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Mounir Gwarzo, director-general of SEC, recently expressed concern that TSA operation had greatly reduced the capital market regulator’s ability to be flexible.
Gwarzo had said that the commission was currently “running a very tight budget”.
“Given that the market has gone down and given that there are aspirations to move the market up, we have to set aside some amount of money,” he said.
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“The budget of 2015, we had a projection of N6.9 billion as our income but we were only able to make N4.9 billion because of the state of the market.
“We no longer take our staff on overseas and local training and our earnings are now 30 to 40 per cent less than we had in the past.”
However, SEC admitted that the TSA is a more convenient payment platform.
It explained that the commission was one of the first agencies to comply.
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TSA is a a single account or a set of linked accounts for all government transactions. Though conceived by the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari’s administration implemented the policy.
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