The Executive Chairman of the Kwara State Internal Revenue Service (KWIRS) Mrs Shade Omoniyi has been accused of stealing N8billion from the state treasury in three years.
SaharaReporters learnt that Omoniyi and her associates allegedly stole the money by posing as consultants on the Project Phoenix platform, which is run by some close associates of her husband.
“Information gathered from our source has just revealed how the present Executive Chairman of the Kwara State Internal Revenue Service (KWIRS) Mrs Shade Omoniyi and her cronies stole over N8billion from the coffers of the Revenue Service under the guise of providing consultancy service through a platform Project Phoenix using a company belonging to close associates of her husband.
“The Chairperson who was appointed to succeed Professor Muritala Awodun in October 2019 had inherited a platform called Amanda, but dissatisfied with the former consultant providing this platform disengaged their service and replaced them with an arrangement through her husband’s IT company to commence operations from January 2020.
“The arranged firm was offered a commission of 15 percent on the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) collections of the state from what is termed spendable IGR which is about 45 percent of total collections, and 10 percent commission on the non-spendable IGR collections of the State,” a source told SaharaReporters.
In 2020, KWIRS’s IGR figures were N19.6 billion, and the Project Phoenix consultant (Compumetrics Solutions Limited) was paid about N2.2 billion in commission, despite the fact that the platform had yet to be deployed because they were experimenting throughout the year.
KWIRS generated IGR of N26 billion in 2021, and the consultant received a commission of N2.8 billion. KWIRS reported collecting IGR of N23 billion in the first three quarters of 2022 as of September 2022.
SaharaReporters learnt from sources that the commission collected from the same firm, arranged by Mrs Omoniyi to steal the IGR of Kwara State a total of N2.65 billion.
The source continued: “What is most disturbing is the fact that this firm does nothing, according to the staff who provided us with this information, and the previous firm that Mrs Omoniyi met on ground were only being paid a maximum commission of 5 percent while the Service had disengaged the global consultant to KWIRS since May 2019 before Mrs Shade Omoniyi’s engagement in October 2019.
“Rather than come and make the system better in terms of operations and costing, as promised by this administration, Mrs Omoniyi and her cronies have only come to milk the system without adding any value.”
According to another highly placed staff of the establishment, “We supported the government of Abdulrahman Abdulrasaq with the belief that we will get a better Kwara but what we have is a worse off Kwara with the example of the predetermined stealing of IGR of Kwara State by Mrs Omoniyi for her people that brought her.
“In addition to not knowing anything about revenue generation, the woman is not willing to learn at all but quick to intimidate and threaten her staff, a style used to cover up her misdeeds”.
The sources compared what the situation of KWIRS was to a situation of “replacing a digital, enterprising and visionary leadership with an analog and vision less leadership who got the job on a platter of gold and have been left unsupervised because Mr Governor himself is an absentee governor.
“The documentary evidence of how Mrs Shade Omoniyi and her cronies had looted KWIRS has already been put together and forwarded to the appropriate authorities, and if nothing concrete is done, the people of Kwara know what to do also at the appropriate time.”
All efforts by SaharaReporters to get the reactions of Omoniyi to the allegations were unsuccessful.
Calls and messages sent to her were not responded to at the time of filling this report.
