Now Reading: CAG flags Uttar Pradesh budget estimation and reappropriation lapses
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CAG flags Uttar Pradesh budget estimation and reappropriation lapses
India's Comptroller and Auditor General has told Uttar Pradesh's finance department to revisit its manual budgeting practices and produce more realistic estimates, in a Compliance Audit report for the period ending March…
India's Comptroller and Auditor General has told Uttar Pradesh's finance department to revisit its manual budgeting practices and produce more realistic estimates, in a Compliance Audit report for the period ending March 2023 tabled in the state's Vidhan Sabha, according to Hindustan Times. The audit found that a 2022-23 vote-on-account led to ₹219.57 crore being spent with no budgetary provision, an amount still awaiting regularisation. It also found that the state's Integrated Financial Management System has no functionality for surrendering budget provisions, so surrenders and reappropriations are processed manually offline before being entered into the system, delaying the process. The CAG counted 151 irregular reappropriations totalling ₹10,186.62 crore, ₹5,120.88 crore reappropriated to new services between 2018 and 2024 against the state's own budget manual, and 1,885 instances where spending exceeded allotments by a combined ₹13,938.27 crore. Additional chief secretary for finance Deepak Kumar said the state government had already improved the system's functioning.
Indian Opinion Analysis
An audit that documents process failures is not the same as evidence of wrongdoing by any individual, and the state's assurance that IFMS has already improved is not independently checked in this report. The sums involved, several thousand crore rupees across irregular reappropriations and excess spending, are large enough that what happens next matters as much as the findings themselves. Formal regularisation of the flagged amounts, and a working surrender module in IFMS, are the two things that would close the audit's findings.
Source: Hindustan Times
This brief was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
