Senate Knocks SEC For Spending Earnings On Salaries, Emoluments

The Senate has carpeted the Securities and Exchange Commission for spending most of the revenues it generated on salaries and emoluments of staff.

The Senate, through its Committee on Capital Market, insisted that it was wrong of SEC to have expended close to 90 per cent of revenues made in the 2021 fiscal year on staff salaries and emoluments.

The Director-General of SEC, Yuguda Lamido, who appeared before the committee on Wednesday to defend his agency’s 2021 budget performance and the projections for 2022, said, “A total of N11.5bn was projected as revenue for 2021, out of which N2.689bn was realised as of June with the hope of making more before the year runs out.

“Total recurrent expenditure for 2021 was budgeted at N13.53bn but the actual expenditure was N4.063bn by the end of June. Our budgeted deficit was N5.173bn but the actual deficit as of the end of September was N2.834bn due to funding of it from our reserve.”

According to him, although revenue performance is still weak, a series of innovations like the newly introduced charges for secondary investors will boost it up from 2022 fiscal year and beyond.

Yuguda said, “In giving room for more financial inflow, we are planning to retire about 152 top management staff with fat salaries, in paving way for recruitment of fresh workers with attendant less financial burdensome on the commission

“There are measures at reducing expenditure and also measures at increasing revenue of the commission.”

The Chairman of the committee,Senator Ibikunle Amosun, faulted the expenses made by the commission from its revenues.

He said, “Your emolument was almost N6bn out of the N9bn and other expenses; so clearly, you are spending almost all of the revenue that comes to you on staff emolument and other related things.

“You should give us the number of staff that you have in the commission such that we need to look at what is happening. If you generate about N9bn and almost N8bn is purely for servicing the staff, you are having a huge deficit of almost N4bn. When you continuously make this deficit, year in year out, then something is wrong.”

Also, Senator Kashim Shettima asked the SEC DG what measures he had taken so far to increase the commission’s revenue and trim down its expenses.

“You are already bleeding and this bleeding will continue, and if care is not taken, you will reach a point where you cannot even service your obligation,” he said.

In his response, the SEC DG said, “We had the request for the nominal roll and we did give the full nominal roll of the staff last year. We are happy to repeat it this year if is needed.

“When we came in last year into the management of the commission, we actually inherited this situation. We knew it was not sustainable and we tried to immediately start things that will reduce the expenditure.

“If not because of the things that we did when we came in, by now the situation we will be discussing will be even a much dire situation than what is actually on ground. We have reduced staff emolument relating to gratuities, in accordance with the laid-down rules and policies of the commission.”

Yuguda added,”Secondly, we have identified that the commission is top-heavy. We have a lot of senior employees and very few junior employees. In fact, when we came to the commission last year, the commission had not done recruitment of young people since 2011.

“Right now, there is a voluntary early retirement exercise that is going on in the commission. We estimated that about 156 people should take the offer. And we have 162 people indicating interest in the offer. We have a number of revenue generating measures.”