Why banks must embrace Treasury Single Account, by CBN

                

The design and operation of the newly introduced Treasury Single Account (TSA), an e-collection account system is simple and efficient to enable numerous people paying into government accounts through banks do so seamlessly.

The Director, Banking and Payment Systems Department, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Dipo Fatokun, gave thisassurance while speaking on e-collections and cashless society at a sensitisation workshop for banks in Lagos last weekend. He assured the banks that the sensitisation workshop was to ensure that the system worked very well, procedures made efficient and simple so that operators and payers would be clear about this when paying to government.  Continue...

He said: “The biggest chunk of those that will use the facility are not even the MDAs; you can count the number of MDAs, but it may not be easy to count the number of payers bank customers who will have to use this system, in paying to government, so it must be simple for them to understand and to be efficient.”

Lauding the digitised collection, Fatokun said the benefits derivable from the cashless policy and e-collection is the increase in government’s internally generated revenue even as government has a firmer grip on the economic policy and control of inflation. He cited the examples of Lagos and Ogun states, whose internally generated revenue increased as soon as they adopted the cashless policy to buttress his point.

According to him, when they introduced the Lagos State revenue circle management, there was an increase in the collection and it grew annually at an average of six per cent, but after the pilot of the cashless policy started in 2012, it grew by 10 per cent, which was quite substantial.

Similarly, Ogun State started the pilot scheme in 11 state -owned tertiary institutions in response to revenue leakages in the institutions. At the end of the first three months, they reported revenue of N2.5billion, which is about 195 per cent increase in the first quarter of 2011, with no increase in school fees and number of students.

While noting that the issuance of online receipt, the transaction defining appropriate procedures for refunds for over collection, as part of the sensitisation programme, he sought the cooperation of banks and stakeholders, stressing that the Federal Government ecollection would succeed.

He said that the apex bank was aware that in any system, like the e-collection, there were bound to be issues; but that if the mechanism to redress the complaints was not in place, people would lose trust and confidence and would not want to use the system again.

Also speaking at the workshop, the representative of the Accountant General of the Federation, Mr. Susarumso Jared, said that the ecollection processes were a flipside of e-payment. On his part, the Managing Director and Chief Executive of System Specs, Mr. John Obaro, gave insight on how the remita platform works, stressing that it was anintegrated solution for e-collection, e-payment, e-invoicing, e-billing and e-scheduling.

Earlier in her welcome address, Deputy Director and Head, Banking Services Division of Central Bank of Nigeria, Mrs. Margaret Ogundana, gave an insight on the sensitisation workshop. Citing the work of various committees set up to articulate and execute the project since 2013, Ogundana said that the project climaxed when it went live on January