Group of former civil servants says CAG now ‘dysfunctional’
New Delhi: Raising their concern over “poor functioning” of apex auditor, a group of retired civil servants has stated in a letter to President Droupadi Murmu that the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) does not appear to be discharging its duties with the same speed and standards as earlier. The letter is signed by 86 retired IAS, IPS, IFS, and IFoS officers.
The former bureaucrats, who are part of the citizens’ initiative called Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG), urged Murmu to “exercise the authority of your office to ensure that the objectivity and independence of the institution remains uncompromised and that the established processes and controls are not tampered with”.
At the heart of the matter is the seeming decline in the CAG’s activity, with the total number of CAG reports relating to Union government ministries and departments coming down from 55 in 2015 to 14 in 2020, a fall of 75 percent.
As the letter mentions, “The number of audit reports relating to the union government’s functioning which have been submitted before Parliament has shown a declining trend as in the year 2015, 54 reports were tabled which reduced to 43 reports in 2016, 50 reports in 2017, 19 reports in 2018, 18 reports in 2019, 17 reports in 2020, 28 reports in 2021, 30 reports in 2022 and 16 reports in 2023 as of now.”
As per reports, in September, 12 reports were presented by the CAG in the monsoon session of Parliament and days later, the CAG officers who were responsible for the audits that revealed corruption were reportedly transferred.
“These reports highlighted several instances of wrong or excess expenditure by the government and government bodies. Among the most egregious of these cases are the significant cost overruns on road projects of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and other related bodies, and the false records of expenditure under the central government’s flagship health scheme, Ayushman Bharat,” the letter stated
Listing out a series of statistics, the letter cites several examples such as the NHAI’s Dwarka Expressway project under the Bharatmala Pariyojana Phase 1, in which the CAG had found that the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs had approved the project for an amount of Rs 18.20 crore per km, whereas the actual cost incurred was Rs 250.77 crore per km, about 14 times the approved amount.
Similarly, in the case of the government’s Ayushman Bharat scheme or Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), the letter points out how the CAG found that while 88,760 patients had died during treatment, 2,14,923 claims were made at a later date for fresh treatment of the same patients.
“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 letter stated.
On the transfer of CAG officials, who filed the audit reports, the letter said, “These officers have been posted to unimportant positions such as Legal Officer (though the person concerned has no legal background) or to the Rashtra Bhasha cell, etc. and in some cases sent far away from their present place of posting.”
“What is even more serious is that the field audit has been suspended subsequent to the media attention. Stoppage of field audit work means that the CAG has become dysfunctional. It is a serious constitutional misconduct.”
