Urges it to widen role beyond regular audit
The reputation of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is at an all-time high, thanks to the professionally challenging report on 2G spectrum allocation, said R. Rangachari, former Indian Audit and Accounts Services officer and former budget advisor to the International Monetary Fund, here on Friday.
Delivering a lecture on ‘The role of Comptroller and Auditor General of India,' organised by the Public Expenditure Round Table, Mr. Rangachari said, with this, the CAG should widen its role beyond regular audit.
Lack of transparency in accounts and budget was one of the areas that deserved the CAG's attention.
Understatements
Many cases of understatement of expenditure were noticeable. Oil subsidies did not reflect the full annual subsidy payable by the government. Transparency of data was lacking in this regard, he said. The CAG, as auditor of oil marketing companies, was in a position to highlight the total liabilities on this account for government, he said.
Regulatory audit caught the attention of media and the public as many scandals in raising revenue and spending were highlighted.
The latest example was spectrum allocation, in which the audit had brought to light serious cases of fraud and embezzlement.
The other examples were the fodder scam in Bihar in 1996 and the Veeranam Project in Tamil Nadu in the 1970s, he said.
Public sector banks and insurance companies were outside the purview of CAG. This anomaly needed to be rectified.
Adequacy of CAG's powers in the context of widening its role had to be revisited, Mr. Rangachari added.
Keywords: CAG report on 2G, 2G scam
The CAG has done a good job. To be precise brave and straight forward approach. Eventhough Sibal mentioned it not good. He stood by his words. Read brave May be my comment is not straight forward. Few things I wanted to note. 1. Insurance companies having joint venture with foreign companies. This should be scanned from CAG point of view. 2. Get the list of money hidden in foreign banks. They should have escaped auditing. That should also come under the scanner. 3. People who are contesting in elections multiple times. EC should send information of all these people to a common auditing committee and they should verify that other than EC itself doing that. 4. Audits can be done on welfare schemes in states and audotir can propose that this scheme shall not be taken as it will turn ti a loss. All these will serve good to the nation. May be they are not direct CAG auditing. However as I think all audits come under CAG.
The CAG is now definitely getting the attention of the media and the people that it should have. However, still there are many cases which find a mention in CAG's reports but seems not much action taken by govt. in respect of these cases. In an interesting case, army purchased some missiles from a company just because the staff union of that company requested the Defence Minister to do so although missiles had been rejected by the army being of low quality.
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