The House of Representatives Committee on Public Procurement has queried the Bureau of Public Procurement over the spending of N57 million on local and international travels as well as N22 million spent on welfare packages for staff during the lockdown occasioned by COVID-19 pandemic.

The Committee asked the questions when the agency appeared before it during a budget defence hearing at the House of Representatives.

Chairman of the committee Ali Nasir Ahmed also frowned at the failure of BPP to audit government agencies as stipulated in its establishment act noting that only 32 ministries, departments and agencies out of over 850 agencies were have been audited so far.

Ahmed demanded that the audit report of the BPP between 2016 to 2019 be submitted before the end of the year.

In his response, Director General of  BPP, Mamman Hamadu said the agency does not have the record and are not sure of it, adding that the reason for low performance in auditing was due to lack of funds.

The Committee while assessing the 2020 Budget questioned the expenditure of N19 million for local and international training of staff as well as the inefficiency of BPP on monitoring, surveillance and call centre management whereby the sum of N22 million and N38 million was released but left unspent among other alleged corrupt practices.