THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: For the third straight year, the Cooperative Audit Department, which is plagued by a severe shortage of auditors, is most likely to miss the statutory September 30 deadline for completing auditing work.
Following the enactment of the Cooperative Amendment Act 2013, as per the 97th Constitutional Amendment, cooperative institutions are bound to present the audit reports at general body meetings to be held before September 30.
However, in the last two years the Audit Department had not been complying with its statutory commitment due to severe manpower shortage. In its wake, the government extended the date by issuing gazette notification. This time, the government may bring in an ordinance to extend the date to tide over the situation.
The cooperative auditors said staff shortage will severely impact the auditing work. “In the event of not presenting the completed audit in the general body meeting of each cooperative institution, as mandated by the Cooperative Amendment Act, the director board of such institutions will have to be dissolved,” they said.
According to them, the department is still following the staff pattern fixed in 1982. There are over 1,600 PACS and over 3,000 non credit societies, besides apex cooperatives in coir, handloom, dairy, fisheries and cashew sectors.
V Sanal Kumar, Cooperative Audit Director, told Express the department is engaged in efforts to comply with the norms in majority of institutions.
“In some of the societies computer systems have become corrupted. In Consumerfed and Capex,auditing work has been hit as a Vigilance probe is on into the corruption charges. Moreover, in the wake of amalgamation of District Cooperative Banks with State Cooperative Banks the auditing work may not be completed there,” he said.
On the issue of manpower shortage, Kumar said the government had already filled over 500 vacancies through direct recruitment. So far 20 per cent of auditor posts had been earmarked for transfer postings from Village Extension Officers (VEO). Since the VEOs are reluctant to work in the Audit Department, those posts also had been referred to the general pool. Regarding whether the government is mulling bringing in an ordinance to extend the date till December 31, he said in case there is difficulty in completing audit before September 30, the government will have to take the ordinance route.