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The Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which scrutinises the reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), feels that the recent Delhi High Court verdict that the government auditor could audit the accounts of private telecom operators will help in improving transparency in the system.
The PAC Chairman and senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Murli Manohar Joshi said CAG was mandated to audit government accounts and also had to ensure that the exchequer had received every rupee due to it.
But, he cautioned that the court order should not be misinterpreted to mean that the auditor may now follow every industrialist. “It should not be predatory auditing. Rather, such steps should help in improving the transparency of business,” Joshi told Business Line .
Joshi has been demanding that CAG’s strength should be increased by making it a multi-member panel.
He had also endorsed the suggestion of including auditors from independent panels to improve the expertise of the Government auditor whenever such an occasion arose.
“The CAG has the powers to audit public money. Be it 51 per cent, 49 per cent or just one per cent, the CAG has to do its duty,” Joshi said.
Grey area Senior member in the panel and Biju Janata Dal MP Bhartruhari Mahtab said the Delhi High Court verdict was welcome but it was dealing with a ‘grey area’ of the actual scope of CAG. “There is a scope for improving the auditor’s role. In PPP models, the CAG has a scope to audit. But that audit will be restricted only to accounts that accrue to government assets,” Mahtab said.
The Congress has been critical of the judgment while the Left parties and the Aam Aadmi Party have welcomed it. The CPI (M)’s mouthpiece, People’s Democracy, said in an editorial that audit by CAG would break ‘crony capitalism’.
“Some spokesmen of India Inc. have gone to the extent of threatening that in the background of a general economic slowdown in the country, such moves of a CAG audit check of private companies will further regress the economy! This only amounts to suggesting that the existing overwhelming prevalence of ‘crony capitalism’ that permits profit maximisation through means other than legitimate must remain unregulated and unchecked,” it said.
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