Fiscal technology reforms: The top-down angle

By Chibueze Onyekpere

In February 2026, the media ran a review marking a decade since Nigeria’s Treasury Single Account (TSA) went fully live, crediting it with pulling roughly N3trillion in idle government funds out of commercial banks where it had been sitting while the government itself borrowed at high interest to cover salaries and projects. It is, on its face, an absurd image: a government paying interest to borrow money it already owned, because nobody could see where the money was. That absurdity is the starting point for understanding why Nigeria’s anti-corruption strategy of the last decade has been less about chasing thieves and more about closing the rooms where they used to work.

The TSA is the centerpiece. The basic idea — recommended by the IMF and used in various forms worldwide — is unglamorous: instead of letting every government ministry, department, and agency keep its own scattered bank accounts, route everything through one consolidated account at the Central Bank. Before the reform, ministries and agencies under-remitted collections, sat on deducted taxes, and parked government funds in commercial banks to quietly earn private interest, with more than 17,000 scattered government accounts making the system close to un-auditable by design. The TSA, built on the back of a homegrown payment platform called Remita, closes that gap: every naira that enters government now passes through a single gateway, and every transaction leaves a trace.

Early phases were notably effective at the margins. A 2012 pilot covering 217 federal agencies was credited with saving roughly N500 billion in spending that would otherwise have leaked out as “frivolous” disbursements. The bigger structural shift came after full implementation under the Buhari administration in 2015. The reform has not been without political turbulence — most notably a 2015 Senate dispute over whether Remita, as a private fintech rather than a bank, was constitutionally entitled to collect government revenue and a 1% commission on it, an allegation the company and the Central Bank of Nigeria disputed at the time.

The companion system on the personnel side is IPPIS — the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System — designed to kill off “ghost workers,” the fictitious or duplicated names that for years quietly drew real salaries from Nigeria’s wage bill. By centralizing payroll and tying it to biometric verification, IPPIS makes it considerably harder to keep a name on the books with no person behind it. Government officials told reporters in 2022 that the system had eliminated roughly 70,000 ghost workers from the federal payroll, with savings estimates that have varied by year ranging from N22 billion to N220 billion depending on the source of the estimate. The system is not static: as recently as February 2025, the Office of the Accountant-General was still running fresh identity-verification deadlines for civil servants, with the explicit threat of suspended salaries for anyone who failed to confirm they were, in fact, a real person doing a real job.

BVN — the Bank Verification Number — does a similar work on the financial-tracking side, linking biometric identity to bank accounts across the system, which makes it harder for illicit flows to hide behind shell identities or proxy accounts, and which IPPIS researchers have specifically recommended pairing with payroll audits to catch ghost workers who manage to slip past one system but not the other.

None of these reforms is self-executing, and that is where the top-down story gets less triumphant. Academic audits of TSA performance have found that government revenue growth essentially flattened rather than accelerated in the years after implementation, suggesting the system curbed certain leakages without meaningfully expanding the revenue base — a reminder that plugging a pipe is not the same as turning up the pressure. IPPIS, for its part, has been dogged by complaints from civil servants and unions — the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has accused it of erroneous deductions for years — and some agencies have resisted full onboarding, slowing the system’s reach. IPPIS itself was first introduced under the Jonathan administration and reportedly stalled amid resistance from some ministries and departments. There are claims that political/banking interests pressured the Jonathan administration to shelve early enforcement before the Buhari administration revived it through pure administrative pressure rather than new legislation.

There is also a less flattering reading of why these systems work as well as they do: they work where money is countable and traceable by nature — salaries, single-account transfers, registered bank holders. They are far less suited to the harder problem of preventing capture upstream, at the point where contracts are awarded and vendors are chosen. E-procurement platforms, like the Nigeria Open Contracting Portal, exist precisely to address that gap by publishing tender data for public scrutiny — but publishing data is not the same as preventing the data from describing a rigged process. A digitized bid can still be a bid pre-arranged for a politically connected vendor; the system simply records the outcome more cleanly than before. Likewise, digitization efforts such as the Nigeria Customs Service’s (NCS) e-customs modernization (branded B’Odogwu) aim to reduce the discretionary, cash-in-hand interactions that have long defined border posts — but enforcement officers retain plenty of informal leverage points that a screen cannot fully eliminate, from inspection delays to “additional documentation” requests that function as soft extortion.

The pattern across all of these systems is consistent: digitization removes the easiest, most repetitive forms of discretionary leakage — the ghost worker, the dormant account quietly drawing interest, the under-remitted collection. It is much less effective against one-off, high-value discretionary decisions made by a small number of powerful people, which is where Nigeria’s largest sums have historically vanished. The contrast between the systems’ real successes on payroll and revenue collection, and Nigeria’s continuing struggles with high-level fiscal opacity — debt servicing absorbing an outsized share of revenue, and persistent allegations of under-remittance by state oil entities — suggests that technology has automated away the corruption of clerks while leaving the corruption of principals largely untouched.

What top-down digitization has reliably delivered is durability through bureaucratic embedding: once a payroll runs through IPPIS or a transaction must clear the TSA. Reversing that is institutionally costly, which makes these systems comparatively hard to politically unwind even when a new administration arrives uninterested in transparency. What it has not delivered is proof that less money is being stolen overall — only that it is harder to steal it in the old ways. The honest assessment is that we have witnessed a decade of incrementalism. These are real, measurable plumbing improvements, sitting inside a fiscal system whose largest leaks may simply have moved one floor up.

The post Fiscal technology reforms: The top-down angle appeared first on The Sun Nigeria.