How CAG reports are prepared
Atono Tsükrü Kense
Kohima | November 10
As enshrined in the Constitution of India, Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) is one of the powerful pillars of the democratic system, which acts as the guardian of the public money and controls the financial system of the country both the central and state level.
CAG report provides an analytical review of the finances of the government arising from the performance audits and test audit of transactions of various departments of the state government pertaining to general, economic and revenue sectors. CAG reports present an overall picture of the financial performance including mismanagement and fraudulent withdrawals of funds, for the state government to take timely actions.
To have a better understanding on how and why a CAG report is prepared, The Morung Express spoke to the incumbent Principal Accountant General Director A Pihoto Chophy and former Accountant General (AG) Kohima, Sword Vashum, who went on to retire as Additional Deputy CAG.
How CAG report is prepared
Our mandate from CAG is to report, so we carry out all these to basically report, and finally lay it in the house through the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), said Chophy adding, “We aid the committee by giving them the factual position of the report we have prepared.”
Acknowledging that it might have missed out many things in the process, he said, “We just have our way of doing risk analysis, but we do try to cover everything, if not in one year, the next two-three years, we try to balance it to have the whole coverage.”
Vashum said, “We pick and choose as far the report preparation is concerned as we cannot do inspection 100%,” citing “if we have chosen a particular year, and transactions happened during that particular year it would be subject to audit’s scrutiny investigation or examination.” On how the initial preparation of report starts, Vashum explained that a preliminary inspection report is prepared in the field or wherever the offices are located which is then placed before the head of the office seeking replies or explanations on the spot.
The report is dropped, if the reply of the concerned office is found satisfactory. However, the report is taken to the audit inspection report, if there are no satisfactory explanations from their end, he said. “Then, it is brought to the head office of the Accountant General office who goes through the entire reports, particularly those based on their explanations, because of their importance or seriousness of lapses.”
It was also informed that AG is not competent to finalise the report, as the report is finalised at the level of the CAG, which is then, brought to the notice of the PAC.
The challenges
“The process of preparing a report is challenging in many ways,” besides the difficult terrain and natural calamities which hinders the team many a time who goes to every district and sub-divisions of the state, said Chophy.
In terms of documents, he said that many departments do not maintain the documents properly, which according to him is very challenging adding, “There are instances of missing documents and information which are not kept properly.”
Stating that it is not easy to have easy access to all information, Chophy said, “Not getting a complete picture due to lack of information is a real challenge.”
To this, he said it has to rely so much on its own efforts to get information. He also informed that, “In most cases, everything appears to be good and done in the documents.” But, not to be fooled by the things in the paper, he stated, “To have the assurance, we do lots of physical verifications to substantiate our reports/cases as pointed out in the report.”
While it relies so much on its own efforts to verify what is on paper which, in itself is a humongous task, he also added, “There are challenges where it becomes very difficult for department personnel to admit that ‘this is not done’ but somewhere the fact stands out.”
This is the first of a two-part series.
