CAG to supervise audit of parties' accounts

India’s accounting watchdog the Comptroller and Auditor General has agreed to supervise the auditing of accounts of registered political parties and expenditure of candidates contesting in elections for legislative bodies.

Updated on: Jul 28, 2011, 24:54:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s accounting watchdog the Comptroller and Auditor General has agreed to supervise the auditing of accounts of registered political parties and expenditure of candidates contesting in elections for legislative bodies.

Each registered political party is required to submit annual financial statement with the commission and candidates contesting polls have to submit expenditure reports with the returning officers.

The commission does not have wherewithal to analyse them as there are over 1,100 political parties and thousands contest elections. And, therefore it wanted CAG to audit the accounts.

Documents released under Right To Information Act to NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) show that Roy Mathani, Director General, CAG, had agreed to monitor audit done by chartered accounts empanelled by the constitutional body. The reply was in response to ADR’s RTI application regarding steps being taken for better financial monitoring of domestic Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs).

Mathani was also of the view this will help in ensuring transparency in the functioning of political parties and CAG could conduct an overall audit of the findings of the chartered accountants. A similar mechanism for conducting audit of election expense accounts maintained by District Election Officers was also suggested.

“The political parties are public bodies, as exemption from tax is allowed on their funds. Therefore, their accounts should be audited by a panel appointed by CAG as it is done in case of Public Sector Units,” Mathani said, as per the documents released under RTI.

In order to have more transparency, Amarjit Chopra, president of Indian Institute of Chartered Accountants wanted that the political parties should submit audit accounts on the pattern of public limited entities and should publish their balance sheet every year. Chopra also wanted that the Income Tax exemption limit for donations paid to political parties should be increased from Rs 20,000 per annum to Rs 50,000.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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