Twenty-four state agencies have financial statements awaiting external audit, with Obudu Ranch Resort’s records missing from the audit trail since 2014. The deeper issue is what prolonged gaps mean for public oversight.
The audit trail stops where public money should become most visible
CALABAR — For some Cross River State institutions, the financial year has ended. Budgets have been approved. Money has been released. Programmes have been announced and assets have continued to sit on the state’s books.
But for 24 statutory agencies and parastatals, the formal financial trail remains incomplete.
The Cross River State Auditor-General’s 2025 Annual Report and Accounts identifies 24 institutions that failed to submit financial statements for external audit. The state’s public revenue service published the 2025 annual report on June 30, 2026.
The oldest gap belongs to Obudu Ranch Resort.
Its last submitted account was for 2013, leaving statements covering 2014 through 2025 outstanding. That is not simply a late filing. It is a 12-year break in the audit trail.
The Cross River State Water Board Limited follows with statements outstanding from 2018 to 2025, while the Management Development Institute has accounts outstanding from 2016 to 2025.
The striking question is therefore not only why individual accounts are late.
It is what happens to accountability when an institution can operate for years without its financial statements entering the external audit process.
A missing audit is not proof of missing money
That distinction matters.
The Auditor-General’s report does not, by itself, establish that public funds were stolen or misappropriated by the affected institutions.
What it establishes is that the Auditor-General could not complete the normal external audit process because required financial statements had not been submitted.
The report itself warns that the affected bodies “may not have prepared their Annual Financial Statement as required by law” and says the situation could lead to a “lack of accountability in government fund expended”.
Those are findings about an oversight gap, not a finding of criminal conduct.
Yet an audit gap still has consequences.
Without timely accounts, auditors have a reduced ability to test whether revenue was properly recorded, expenditure was supported, assets were properly valued, liabilities were disclosed and transactions complied with financial rules.
That is why the Constitution does not treat public auditing as optional.
What Section 125 requires
Section 125 of the 1999 Constitution establishes an Auditor-General for every state. It provides for the audit of state public accounts and gives the Auditor-General access to books, records, returns and other documents connected to those accounts. It also gives the state Auditor-General power to conduct periodic checks of statutory corporations, commissions, authorities and agencies established by state law.
In other words, the audit system is designed to create a second layer of scrutiny between public expenditure and public accountability.
The institutions are expected to produce the records.
The auditors examine them.
The House of Assembly receives the report and its Public Accounts Committee is expected to consider it.
When an institution does not submit the records, that chain becomes weaker at its most important point.
The problem is older than the 2025 report
There is an important historical detail buried beneath the latest finding.
Cross River’s problem with outstanding accounts is not new.
The state’s 2020 audit documentation, published as part of the World Bank-supported States Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability programme, recorded several of the same institutions with outstanding accounts.
At the time, Obudu Ranch Resort already had outstanding accounts for 2014 to 2020 after submitting accounts only up to 2013. The Cross River State Water Board had outstanding accounts from 2018 to 2020, while CRUTECH had outstanding accounts covering 2018 to 2020. The report also listed the Property Investment company, Forestry Commission, Community and Social Development Agency, Privatisation Council and several other bodies with unresolved accounts.
That makes the 2025 findings more significant.
In Obudu’s case, the same starting point in 2014 remains visible in the latest report, meaning the audit gap identified years ago extends through 2025.
The issue is therefore not merely one year’s administrative delay.
It points to a recurring institutional problem in closing the books of publicly controlled entities.
The 24 institutions
The 2025 report identifies a broad range of agencies.
They include Obudu Ranch Resort, Cross River State Water Board Limited, Cross River University of Technology, now known as the University of Cross River State, Cross River State Property Investment Limited, Tourism Bureau, Sports Commission, Rural Development Agency and Carnival Commission.
Others are the Cross River State Communities and Social Development Agency, Forestry Commission, Council on Privatisation, Bureau of Public Private Partnership, Scholarship Board, Library Board, State Technical Education Board, State Secondary Education Board, Cross River State Newspaper Corporation and Cross River State Broadcasting Corporation.
The list also includes the Management Development Institute, Teachers Continuing Training Institute, Cross River State Universal Basic Education Board, University of Education and Entrepreneurial Development, Summit Hills Estate Development Services Limited and Tinapa Resort.
UNICROSS confirms that the former CRUTECH was renamed University of Cross River State in February 2021.
The diversity of the institutions matters.
This is not one ministry or one narrow administrative function.
The outstanding accounts cut across tourism, education, broadcasting, newspapers, infrastructure, public-private partnerships, water, development agencies and commercial state-owned entities.
The length of the gaps tells another story
The report shows several distinct layers of delay.Institution or groupAccounts outstandingObudu Ranch Resort2014–2025Management Development Institute2016–2025Cross River State Water Board2018–202511 agencies including Tourism Bureau, Sports Commission, CROSPIL and Carnival Commission2019–2025Rural Development Agency2020–2025CRUTECH/UNICROSS2023–2025Communities and Social Development Agency2023–2025Teachers Continuing Training Institute2024–2025
The remaining institutions were also flagged by the Auditor-General, with some records listed without a specific period of outstanding accounts.
The pattern is important because seven years of missing statements means seven years in which an external audit cannot provide an uninterrupted examination of an institution’s financial record.
Twelve years is an even more serious break.
The uncomfortable question: where does oversight end?
Public finance depends on records.
Budgets say what government plans to spend.
Budget implementation reports show what government says it has spent.
Audited accounts are supposed to provide an independent examination of those claims.
When accounts do not reach the external auditor, the public loses part of that final verification layer.
That does not automatically mean that expenditure was improper.
It means that the public cannot rely on the audit process to provide the same level of assurance it would have provided had the records been submitted.
This is particularly relevant for institutions that handle revenue, administer public programmes, manage assets or operate commercial ventures.
Obudu Ranch Resort is an obvious example.
So too are the Water Board, the state’s education institutions and the commercial entities in the list.
The Auditor-General wants explanations and sanctions
The Auditor-General’s report does not stop at identifying the gaps.
It recommends that institutions that failed to submit their audited financial statements explain their non-compliance.
It goes further.
“All statutory bodies that have not submitted their Audited Financial Statements to the Office of the Auditor-General, should explain why they should not be sanctioned,” the report stated.
That recommendation places the next question squarely before the relevant authorities.
What happens after the audit report?
An audit finding has little practical effect if it is repeatedly recorded and then allowed to disappear into another administrative cycle.
The Constitution gives the House of Assembly a formal role in considering the Auditor-General’s reports through its Public Accounts Committee.
Cross River is now talking about stronger compliance
There is an interesting development in the state at the same time.
On September 1, 2026, the Cross River State Audit Service Commission called for amendments to the 2021 Audit Law, arguing for stronger collaboration with the Ministry of Justice to improve compliance, transparency and accountability.
The state Attorney-General, according to the report, assured the commission that the Ministry of Justice would support appropriate legal action against institutions that fail to comply with audit laws.
That conversation is happening against the backdrop of the Auditor-General’s latest findings.
It raises an obvious practical test.
Will stronger rules produce stronger compliance, or will the state continue to record the same institutions with years of outstanding accounts?
The state is also expanding audit activity
Recent official statements indicate that auditing and financial accountability remain active areas of the state government’s reform agenda.
On August 31, the Chairman of the Cross River State House of Assembly Service Commission said an ongoing audit of the commission’s finances was intended to identify funding gaps and assess compliance with public financial regulations.
On September 17, the state government also announced sponsorship for 12 local-government auditors to attend the Association of National Accountants of Nigeria’s annual conference, describing the initiative as part of efforts to strengthen financial accountability.
Those developments suggest that audit capacity is receiving attention.
The unresolved agency accounts show that capacity is only one part of the problem.
Compliance matters just as much.
What the public still cannot see
The Auditor-General’s warning contains the central issue.
Until the accounts are produced and examined, there is no complete external audit trail for the periods outstanding.
That leaves unanswered questions about revenue, expenditure, assets, liabilities and financial controls.
For Obudu Ranch Resort, the gap stretches back to 2014.
For the Management Development Institute, it goes back to 2016.
For the Water Board, 2018.
And for 11 of the listed agencies, the missing statements begin in 2019.
These are not accounting abstractions.
They are years of public financial activity that the state Auditor-General says were not available for the required external audit.
The real test now is not whether another report will identify the same problem.
It is whether the missing years will finally be brought into the light.
Because accountability does not end when public money is spent.
It becomes meaningful when somebody can independently trace where that money went, what it achieved and whether the records support the claim.
For Cross River’s 24 affected agencies, that audit trail remains unfinished.
And until it is completed, one of the most important questions in public finance remains open: what happened to the years the auditors could not see?
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