The Auditor General Edward Ouko has once again raised concerns over the effectiveness of Nairobi County’s Ejiji Pay electronic system in revenue collection.
In the latest audit report for the 2016-2017 financial year, Ouko says City Hall could have lost billions of shillings because it did not know how much it collects every year through JamboPay system owned by Webtribe.
Ouko noted that the the then governor Evans Kidero administration did not have access to trust account where billions of shillings were collected and therefore relied on a contracted company to know how much they collected.
For instance the county collected sh10 .9 billion in that financial year but Jambopay who only declared their net pay collected sh7.2 billion representing 72 percent of the amount collected did not declare the entire amount they collected.
“It was noted that the amount collected was net of the vendors’ fee of 4.5percent. Documents detailing the deduction by Jambopay during the year were not however provided for audit review. In the circumstance, it was not possible to confirm the total amount of money the company had deducted in the 2016/2017 and in the past financial years,” the report presented to Senate says.
This denied the county the opportunity to know how much they collected during the year.
And despite not participating in collecting the entire amount, JamboPay courtesy of its contract with City Hall according Ouko billed 4.5percent for the entire amount collected.
This means that JamboPay was paid sh450 million apart from sh125i million paid to the firm completely out of their efforts.
"The county executive does not do validation/reconciliation and does not have access to the trust account of actual revenue collected by JamboPay.As noted in the previous reports,since the county is able to collect its own revenue through its own effort, the cost of the contract should have been the percentage incremental revenue over and above the average actual revenue collected over an agreed period of time," Ouko notes in the explosive report.
He adds: "Basing on the cost of contract on the total revenue would mean that M/S Webtribe Ltd would gain both from Nairobi county own effort/efficiency and convenience brought about by the system despite the fact that all revenue is collected by the county staff".
On the parking of vehicles within the city, the report says that although 1.3million cars were parked in that financial year, only 400,000 vehicles representing a paltry 31 percent paid for parking while the remaining 69 percent did not thus occasioning a loss of sh 270 million.
The report also identified the rot in the clamping of vehicles which was a cash cow for the field clear who did not remit the cash prior to unclamping of the vehicles.
There were 25,700 vehicles which were clamped according to the systems records but parking attendants unclamped 15, 388 cars representing 60 percent without any charges leading to loss of revenue amounting to millions of shillings.
While off streets parkings at Law courts, Sunken, Nginda and intercontinental which have a total of 370 parking slots , collected despite the fact that there was double parking in most of them.
Revenue collected from the four parkings amounted to sh20m against an estimated collection capacity of sh33 million which Ouko says resulted in a loss of sh12 million in the year.