The Presidential Initiative on Continuous Audit (PICA), formally approved by the Federal Executive Council on 9 March 2016, represents a structural departure from the episodic commission-of-inquiry model that had characterised Nigerian accountability exercises — replacing retrospective, panel-based approaches with a standing, real-time internal audit mechanism embedded within government financial management systems. Its design distinguished it as the most institutionally ambitious fiscal integrity programme of the Buhari civilian presidency.
PICA was conceived and championed by Mrs Kemi Adeosun, Minister of Finance from November 2015 to September 2018. Its establishment was a direct response to revelations emerging from the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) audit of 2015–2016, which indicated thousands of ghost workers — non-existent employees or employees receiving multiple salary payments — were drawing wages from the federal payroll. The convening authority was the Presidency acting through the Federal Ministry of Finance; operational leadership was vested in Mr Mohammed Dikwa, Head of the Continuous Audit Team, comprising accountants, data analysts, and forensic specialists.
PICA's mandate encompassed three principal areas: payroll verification and cleansing across all federal Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs); asset verification — confirming physical existence of assets listed on MDA inventories; and revenue assurance — tracking actual internal revenue generation against declared receipts. The methodology involved biometric verification of all payroll entries against the IPPIS database, physical headcounts, and data reconciliation with the CBN-managed Treasury Single Account (TSA) introduced in 2015.
Findings in the first two years were striking. By February 2016, PICA had identified approximately 23,846 ghost workers across federal MDAs, generating monthly payroll savings estimated at $11.5 million (approximately ₦3.5 billion). By July 2016, further payroll discrepancies of ₦5.7 billion monthly had been identified in a Kano review session. Over the full operational period through 2018, PICA reported identification of over 50,000 erroneous or fraudulent payroll entries, with aggregate monthly savings exceeding ₦18 billion. Asset verification revealed significant under-reporting and misclassification; the revenue assurance function identified MDAs retaining IGR outside the TSA in contravention of the 2015 TSA directive.
PICA's institutional momentum diminished after Adeosun's resignation in September 2018, following disclosures that she had not served the mandatory National Youth Service Corps year. The initiative was retained nominally under the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning. Its payroll cleansing results were incorporated into the revised IPPIS framework, whose compulsory extension to universities provoked prolonged ASUU strike action between 2020 and 2022, illustrating how a fiscal-integrity instrument became entangled in the politics of tertiary education governance.