Ondo SUBEB Accused of Stonewalling Auditors, Lawmakers for Five Years Running by
The Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB) in Ondo State has spent half a decade brushing off queries from state auditors and directives from the House of Assembly, according to the newly released 2025 Auditor-General’s report — a pattern that has reignited worries about how the board handles public money.
The report shows a backlog of problems going back to 2021 that remain unresolved, even after repeated follow-ups from both the Auditor-General’s office and the Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
A section of the report dealing with matters carried over from 2021 through 2024 notes that several issues flagged in the original 2021 audit are still pending.
The timeline laid out in the report shows the PAC first reviewed the Auditor-General’s 2019 and 2020 findings in July 2022 and ordered SUBEB to resolve everything that had been flagged. The Auditor-General’s office says it followed up with formal reminder letters in December 2022 and again in April 2023, referencing the committee’s resolutions — but received no reply from the board on either occasion.
Lawmakers didn’t let the matter drop. In March 2026, the PAC took up the Auditor-General’s 2021, 2022, and 2023 reports and this time instructed SUBEB to bring in the Auditor-General’s office to physically inspect outstanding projects. According to the report, that inspection still hasn’t happened because the board never made arrangements for it.
Missing contract paperwork
Auditors also say SUBEB has failed to hand over documentation for contracts tied to UBEC/SUBEB capital projects from 2020 and 2021. A formal request for those records went out in April 2023, but the Auditor-General’s office reports it never got a response. A second reminder sent in late April 2025 met the same silence, according to the report.
Taken together, the findings point to a sustained pattern: audit queries left unanswered, contract records never produced, and legislative directives for project inspections ignored — despite multiple rounds of pressure from both the Auditor-General and the state Assembly’s oversight committee.
This isn’t the first red flag raised about SUBEB’s spending in Ondo. SaharaReporters previously reported that even though the state government said it had disbursed roughly N14.7 billion for basic education through SUBEB between 2024 and 2025, residents of Arimogija in Ose Local Government Area described New Church Primary School as badly neglected — raising questions about where the money actually went.