Thiruvananthapuram: Chief minister V D Satheesan called for a discussion on whether legislatures could dismiss audit findings through majority resolutions, as was done in the case of KIIFB, and on the comptroller and auditor general of India’s (CAG) audit methodology in cases involving policy decisions or public-private partnership (PPP) projects.The chief minister, speaking at the conference of chairpersons of public accounts committees (PACs) of Parliament and state legislatures in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday, criticised the use of legislative majority to curtail the powers of PACs.“Keralam legislative assembly formally excluded KIIFB audit (it is an extra budgeting mechanism of borrowing) findings from the scrutiny of PAC through an unusual procedure in Jan 2021. The assembly passed a resolution that officially rejected and expunged specific adverse observations of the CAG report, effectively bypassing the standard PAC review mechanism for those findings,” Satheesan said.He said no legislature was constitutionally competent to dismiss or expunge findings in a CAG report on the basis of a majority vote. “Such practices could weaken parliamentary institutions and undermine the principles of financial accountability.”Satheesan also said that the CAG’s audit approach sometimes shifts in a manner that defeats the very purpose of the audit, and that the question was how PAC could approach such audit findings. Referring to the CAG’s 2010 report on the allocation of 2G spectrum, Satheesan said the widely cited estimate of Rs 1.76 lakh crore was a hypothetical presumptive projection rather than an actual realised loss.“It extrapolated potential revenue based on later benchmarks, such as 3G spectrum auction prices and later 2014 re-auction realizations, rather than actual market conditions in 2008,” he said.He said that “CAG stepped outside its traditional mandate of financial oversight by questioning the merits of a deliberate govt policy decision rather than auditing procedural and administrative lapses.”Satheesan cited the CAG’s findings on the Vizhinjam International Deepwater Multipurpose Seaport Project, and said that the audit approach had treated the PPP venture like a conventional public sector undertaking.This failed to take into account the different commercial, financial and risk-sharing structures of PPP projects, he said and added that the methodology evaluated the port as a standard, standalone profitable asset from day one.“It failed to adjust for the fact that massive mega-infrastructure setups require heavy state-backed viability gap funding precisely because they are not financially viable on a standalone basis during their early lifecycles,” he said.Satheesan also urged a special drive to clear the pending files, some of them pending for 20 years before CAG, as it undermined the relevance of legislative scrutiny.Inaugurating the conference, Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla urged PACs to leverage AI, data analytics and responsible technology to strengthen financial oversight and prevent misuse of public funds. “Technology can play an important role in analysing large volumes of expenditure data, identifying emerging trends, detecting potential financial irregularities and improving the monitoring of audit observations,” he said.He expressed concern over audit observations remaining unresolved for 10, 15 or even 20 years and called for a concrete, systematic and time-bound action plan to ensure that audit observations and the action arising from them are addressed without undue delay.K C Venugopal, chairperson of PAC in Parliament, said that there should be more audits on health, education, textiles and MSMEs as more reports are being filed only on railways and infrastructure and urged better cooperation from the bureaucracy as none of the chief secretaries of states attended the last PAC meeting called to assess scholarships.
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