In a major lapse from the Amdavad Municipal Corporation (AMC), the audit involved the advance payment of ₹139.44 cr to private contractors that never made it to the annual bookkeeping of the department.

The report In the AMC standing committee meeting held on Jan 11, a 2022–23 report was submitted by the chief auditor.

The chief auditor presented the 2022-23 report to the AMC’s standing committee on Jan 11 revealing that the municipal body has consistently included ₹139.44 cr as advances paid to private contractors and vendors over several years. 

Notably, for the last five years, AMC’s auditor has been raising queries, and the finance department of AMC has failed to respond to them.

These advances are not accounted for in the annual expenses under any expenditure categories each year.

AMC’s auditor had first raised the query in the audit report for 2017-18, but no response was given by AMC, and the queries were dragged forward for the 2022–23 financial year as well.

The concerned officers in AMC are supposed to mention advance expenses under the expense head in the books of accounts of AMC.

In the 2021–22 annual report, on Mar 31, 2022, the debt with private vendors and contractors amounted to ₹128.79 cr as ‘advance payment’, and the carried forward debt from before was an additional ₹10.65 crore.

Sluggish in resolving queries

AMC’s audit department audits the records of the corporation’s various departments every year. In case any irregularity in entries is detected, the auditor sends an audit objection to that department. The concerned department has to respond to the audit objection in 15 days.

But in the meeting, the auditor remarked on the slow pace of clearing queries. There were a total of 6,332 queries in the 2022–23 audits of AMC’s various departments, of which only 522 queries were resolved. The remaining 5,810 queries are pending as of Mar 31, 2023.

A total of 37,624 audit objection queries were unanswered from Apr 1, 2009, to Mar 31, 2023.

In these years, the AMC chief auditor wrote approx 200 letters to the concerned AMC commissioners, deputy commissioners, and officers of departments, but most of the audit objection queries remained unanswered.

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