For those Coimbatore Corporation employees, who had completed 25 years service in the past year, this Republic Day celebrations turned out to be not as fruitful as expected.
According to the officials in the civic body, those colleagues who had blemish-less service attended the function expecting that Mayor P. Rajkumar or Commissioner K. Vijayakarthikeyan would give them cash rewards, as the civic body had been doing so for the past few years.
But they returned disappointed as neither the Mayor nor the Commissioner could give them the service recognition prize due to audit objections, the officials said.
About four months ago, the Local Fund Audit department had written a letter to the civic body officials saying that the Corporation could not give such service recognition awards as there was no provision in the municipal service rules. Only the State Government could do so. The officials said that following the objections, the Corporation could also recover the service recognition cash prize given in the past. Senior officials were unavailable for comment.
