A war of words has started between Comptroller and Auditor General of
The report got tabled on July 17th in parliament and it was also released to Press with Deputy CAG, A N Chatterjee addressing a press conference. Many of the media persons picked up his statement "there was a delay in tabling of the report. The audit findings revealed poor quality controls that have a direct link with what we are witnessing today". A correspondent with a news portal marxist.com embraced the line so eagerly that he endeded up attributing the statement to CAG, and referring to A N Chatterjee as CAG of India! What journalists should have rather done was to simply underline a fact that CAG audit report contained a para on timeline of the performance audit and the time it granted to auditee corporation and ministry to respond:
"The performance audit started with an entry conference with the management in March 2007. The draft Audit Report was issued to the management in February 2008. The audit findings and recommendations were presented in a meeting of the Audit Board held in May 2008 with the representatives that included all the functional Directors of the management. Replies from the management have been received and suitably incorporated in the Audit Report. The draft Audit Report was issued to the Secretary (Urban Development), the GOI and the Chief Secretary, GNCTD in July 2008; their replies have not been received as of September 2008."
So, when journalists didn’t do their homework well, it became easy for Metro Chief Sreedharan to launch an attack on the CAG. On July 22rd, DMRC chief
There’s nothing unpredictable about Sreedharan’s response, however. In another comparable instance, soon after CAG audit report indicting Goa Industrial Development Corporation for the questionable manner of land allocation for SEZs got tabled in assembly, GIDC said the report was not shared with them, even when the report listed their replies and marked several of them as ‘untenable’. What was even more surprising in that case was that CAG had audited the performance of GIDC in its earlier report for the fiscal 2002-’03 as well, and the audit findings reported therein were not taken up for discussion by Goa assembly’s public accounts committee!
A day after we got a taste of Sreedharan’s views on constitutionally established apex audit institution, Hindustan Times carried on its edit page a ‘charitable’ piece on CAG penned by Neelesh Mishra, with inputs from Abhishek Kumar. Mishra’s piece quotes a senior CAG official who spoke on condition of anonymity as he is not authorised to talk to media saying, "We don’t have access to information. Legally we do, but there are no penal provisions. So if they (government officers) don’t give us information, we have no way of forcing them to".
Now what he said was not some top secret audit finding. It was a piece of information that a senior journalist covering CAG and having been conversant with CAG Duties, Powers and Condition of Services Act, 1971 will anyways know. This issue was even on an agenda of Acountant Generals’ Conference held in October 2008 and even got reported by The Times of India dated
The Hindustan Times story that has many paragraphs starting with ‘we suggest’ ends with a hasty quote, "Puiblic sector banks are not audited. What the heck, evven the Reserve Bank of
However, it forgets to say that rather than extending CAG’s oversight role and granting it more powers, the UPA govt in its first term even mulled over the idea of clipping its wings. A committee constituted by Department of Public Enterprise on