Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between fiscal federalism and
accountability in Nigeria. Corruption is a global plague and is endemic in nature. Several policies have been
adopted by the Nigerian Government to institutionalize accountability and combat the scourge of corruption
that have hindered socio-economic progress but to no avail.
Design/methodology/approach – Thus, this study examined fiscal federalism and accountability
issues in Nigeria using secondary data and used the auto-regressive distributed lag econometric technique to
analyse the data.
Findings – The results from this study reveal that fiscal federalism fails to mitigate corruption in the long
run in Nigeria because of poor bureaucratic quality (BQ) and ineffective law and order (LOR).
Social implications – Fiscal decentralization must be accompanied by legislations that will strengthen
BQ of fiscal institutions at subnational levels and promote effective LOR.
Originality/value – This study recommends that for fiscal federalism to mitigate corruption in the long
run, government must adopt appropriate policies to improve BQ and further strengthen LOR in Nigeria. The
finding also suggests that to promote public sector accountability in Nigeria, government should ensure the
simultaneous decentralization of expenditure and revenue to lower tiers of government. This study provides
detailed empirical evidence that fiscal decentralization without accountability will accentuate public sector
corruption, and in the long run, weaken local economic development initiative to boost growth and
development
