It seems that all the hard work done by Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) to minutely assess accounts of various departments to flag aberrations comes to a knot. There is a huge backlog by various departments on what action they have taken on the reports tabled by CAG in Parliament.
Till March 2011, some 1,262 action taken notes were yet to be submitted by various departments on the CAG reports tabled in Parliament, according to Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report.
The ministries are supposed to submit their action taken report within four months of the CAG report tabled in Parliament.
PAC has asked the finance ministry that strict instruction should be given to ministries and departments to set up standing audit committees.
“All the ministries may be requested to hold regular meetings of standing audit committees to review the pending action taken notes (ATNs) and also ensure that ATNs in respect of new audit reports are furnished to the monitoring cell with the prescribed time frame of four months,” said PAC, which is headed by BJP leader Dr Murli Manohar Joshi. It further said that committee of secretaries (CoS), which is chaired by the Cabinet secretary must meet at regular intervals preferably once in three months to take a stock of the pendencies and to ensure that ATNs are invariably submitted in four months.