CAG must keep ‘high standards’: ex-bureaucrats writes to President
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New Delhi: A group of retired civil servants has written to President Droupadi Murmu saying the Comptroller and Auditor General is seemingly is not discharging its duties with its former speed and standards.
The former bureaucrats, who are part of Constitutional Conduct Group, said the number of audit reports on the government’s functioning that the Comptroller and Auditor General submitted to the Parliament showed declining trend in recent years, Scroll reported.
Calling for ensuring the objectivity and independence of the institution, the group said that while there were 54 reports in 2015, there are only 16 reports as of this year.
‘This means either that the working of the CAG has slowed down, or that the organisation, despite detection of flaws in expenditure by the government, is reluctant to present this to Parliament and make the information public,’ the letter to the president, signed by 86 ex-bureaucrats, reportedly said.
The signatories said that the institution must be effective and independent to ensure proper management of public funds.
They claimed that the institution’s ‘high standard’ set to be seemingly waning recently.
The letter reportedly mentioned the institution’s finding of irregularities in the awarding and implementation of project carried out by the National Highways Authority of India.
Though the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved Dwarka Expressway project for Rs 18.20 crore per kilometer but the actual cost came about 14 times higher at Rs 250.77 crore per kilometre, it pointed out.
The former bureaucrats also pointed at Comptroller and Auditor General’s report on potential irregularities in the Ayushman Bharat scheme. The institution reportedly said where
For 88,760 patients who had died during treatment, 2, 14,923 claims were made for the ‘treatment’, the institution reportedly said.
‘Despite the CAG pointing this out, and the National Implementation Agency that implements the programme undertaking that the loophole that existed would be plugged, fresh claims of treatment continued to be made for patients earlier shown as dead,’ the retired civil servants reportedly stated.