Congress MLA Saleng Sangma has rued the apathetic attitude of the bureaucracy manning different departments in responding to queries on revenue leakages. The primary function of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is to scrutinise the audit report of the Comptroller and Auditor General after it has been laid before the legislature. After diligently going through the adverse audit comments the PAC calls for explanation from the relevant departments; compiles its report and presents it before the Assembly. The PAC is therefore an important body under the legislature because it acts as the watchdog of the public purse by examining in detail the audit report and the financial anomalies pointed out in the report. The PAC also scrutinises the appropriation accounts to verify if the funds were legally available and which competent authority sanctioned its use and if the rules and laid down procedures were followed.
As a body holding the Government to account for its use of public money, the PAC also keeps a tab on project execution and whether those are completed on schedule. If not, the PAC has to ask the executing authority as to why and how there were time and cost overruns. What has been regularly pointed out by the CAG in Meghalaya is the non-submission of utilisation certificates after the amount allocated for a particular programme or project has been put to use. A reading of the annual CAG reports point to the repeated non-compliance of departments to rules governing the use of public funds and lack of accountability of the departments concerned, especially short-realisation or non-realisation of taxes from various entities such as mineral exporters, excise taxes from liquor companies and bonded warehouses etc.
The PAC also examines public expenditure not only from the legal and formal perspectives to detect technical irregularities but also from the point of view of the economy, prudent deployment of funds, judicious maintenance of accounts, essentially to detect wasteful expenditure, loss, corruption, extravagance, inefficiency and petty expenses.
In the past the PAC has perhaps not exercised its authority as it should and hence never captured the public imagination. If it did play its assigned role then the revenue leakage would have been plugged in due time. The corruption cases that have assailed the MDA-01 Government and previous governments too would have been detected at the preliminary stages and nipped in the bud. When those in Government know that a Committee mandated by the Legislature to keep a check on the public purse is actually performing its duty diligently they will think many times before lowering their guard to allow corruption and malfeasance to carry on unchecked.