Head: Mr. Owoeye Polysius Olaniran

Introduction

The formal instrument for the establishment of internal audit Unit in Ministries and Extra-ministerial Department is the financial regulation. As stated in chapter 17 thereof, “an internal audit unit is established to provide a complete and continuous audit of the accounts and records of revenue and expenditure, assets, allocated and unallocated stores, where applicable.” Therefore, all activities of the unit are strictly guided by the provision of the financial Regulation and extant treasury and establishment circulars vis-à-vis other duties assigned by management.

Mandate

Internal audit is a managerial control function. Its core mandate is to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of internal control system in the ministry. To this end, the internal audit is directly responsible to the Accounting officer for a detailed audit of the accounts and records and for the examination of the systems and procedures in force. As a prelude to carrying out the above mandate, a detailed programme of audit is usually drafted and submitted to the accounting officer for approval at the beginning of every financial year.

Duties of the Unit

Some of the duties of the Unit include:

Checking compliance with laws, instructions and directives;
Ensuring that Government Accounts are properly kept;
Checking the adequacy of financial and accounting systems;
Checking adequate safeguards against fraud, the controls of receipts and payments, issued and consumption of stores etc.
To ensure that treasury fund is spent as appropriated;
Checking the total operations of Government for economy, efficiency and effectiveness (Value for money audit);
To render monthly, quarterly, half yearly and yearly reports as well as to the Accounting Officer and submit same to the office of the Accountant-General and Auditor-General for the Federation;
To perform other duties that may be assigned by management.