The Comptroller and Auditor General does not appear to be discharging its duties with the same speed and standards as earlier, a group of retired civil servants said on Saturday in a letter to President Droupadi Murmu.
The former bureaucrats, who are part of the Constitutional Conduct Group, urged Murmu to ensure that the objectivity and independence of the institution remains uncompromised.
The group noted that the number of audit reports relating to the Union government’s functioning submitted by the Comptroller and Auditor General before Parliament has shown a declining trend in recent years. It noted that while there were 54 such reports in 2015, there have only been 16 reports till now 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, said.
The signatories said that the Comptroller and Auditor General must be effective and independent so that it can ensure that public funds are managed properly. However, they said that in recent times, the institution’s “high standards” appear to be waning.
The letter to the president took note of a recent report by the authority that found irregularities in the way projects under the National Highways Authority of India were awarded and implemented. It remarked that while the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had approved the Dwarka Expressway project for Rs 18.20 crore per kilometre, the actual cost of the project was about 14 times higher at Rs 250.77 crore per kilometre.
Similarly, the former bureaucrats referred to a Comptroller and Auditor General report on potential irregularities in the Ayushman Bharat scheme. The authority had said that in the cases of 88,760 patients who had died during treatment, 2,14,923 claims were made for the “treatment” of these patients after they had died.
“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 said.
Last month, three Comptroller and Auditor General officers who worked on the reports on the NHAI and Ayushman Bharat were among a group of officials who were transferred, according to The Wire.
The authority, however, said that transfers and postings were matters of administrative convenience and that it was “highly presumptuous” to read ulterior motives into them.
However, on Saturday, the retired civil servants said that the sequence of events gave rise to the suspicion that the officials were “punished for being honest and upright and exposing the misdeeds of government agencies”.
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