By Modupe Gbadeyanka
Not less than N673.7 billion has been remitted to the coffers of the federal government by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) in the first six months of this year.
The Director of DPR, Mr Sarki Auwalu, said the petroleum agency was committed to meeting its target for 2020, especially at a time the nation was struggling to survive because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking during a visit of the Federation Allocation Accounts Committee (FAAC) post-mortem sub-committee to the agency, he said efforts have been made to block all loopholes.
According to him, the DPR operates a cashless revenue system, which enables all revenue remittances to be paid directly to the federation account in compliance with the Treasury Single Account (TSA) policy.
He said the agency also conducts comprehensive quarterly and annual reconciliations of revenue payments to ensure accurate and timely remittances to the central government.
Recently, DPR incurred the wrath of the Senate when it was alleged that of the N2.4 trillion generated in 2019, the agency only remitted N44.5 billion into the Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF), while N88 billion was removed as 4 per cent collection fee out of which N5.72 billion was also remitted, while the balance was used for overhead.
The DPR is a revenue-collection agency for revenues accruable to government from oil and gas industry operations, including oil and gas royalties which represent proportional value of oil and gas production and sales from oilfields.
The agency also generates revenue from the collection of gas flare penalties imposed for gas flaring, concession rentals paid for the grant of oil and gas acreages by exploration as well as production companies and miscellaneous oil revenue, which consists of statutory application fees, licence and permit fees and penalties.
