THE Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA)  has said that it regularly carries out the auditing of the indigenous airlines, but their results are intentionally not made public because of the dynamism of the sector.

Speaking  in his office in Lagos, the Director-General, Dr Harold Demuren, said  the agency was cautious in publishing the results of audit carried out in the airlines.

He opposed the allegation that the last time the NCAA carried out economic audit on any of the airlines was in 2007, saying the agency was presently auditing two carriers in the domestic scene. He however disclosed that the results were supposed to be in the public domain.

His words: “We do that all the time and in fact, there are two auditing going on right now, but we don’t discuss it on the pages of newspapers. They are meant to be in public domain, but things change a lot. We’ once did an audit and we discovered  a particular airline owed fuel marketers and we stepped in. Now, the airline is in credit. So, what do you publish? You ought to be very careful because this is a dynamic system.

“Things change everyday. In this business, you have to be credit worthy. Airlines owe, it is not cash and carry, but there must be trust of enough funds for airlines. If an airline does not have enough funds, we will stop them and we’ve been doing it in the past. We got a report that a particular airline didn’t pay staff salaries and when we moved in, they paid. You must be on top of it all the time. We have a non-punitive system where people tell us what is going on.”

It would be recalled that Aviation Round Table (ART) had recently accused the NCAA of not carrying out the economic audit of the domestic airlines, alleging that the last time it carried out such audit was in 2007.

Speaking for the body, its President, Captain Dele Ore, said that, “Audit is best done by NCAA and the question now is how often do they do it?  We know they are auditing, but how many of them are doing it, how often and then who need to know? Are the public aware of the auditing results so that theycan make a choice? We need to know the viable ones.”