CAG Nails Financial Mismanagement of Kiran Reddy Govt

HYDERABAD: The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has found budgetary assumptions ‘unrealistic’ and expenditure monitoring and control mechanism ‘weak’ in the erstwhile united Andhra Pradesh – in a sharp rebuke to the then Kiran Kumar Reddy government.

As Andhra Pradesh has since been divided into two States, the CAG report was tabled in the State Assemblies of both the States on Thursday.

While expressing displeasure over financial management in united AP, the CAG observed: “The entire supplementary provision of `11,436 crore in 2013-14 proved unnecessary as the actual expenditure of `1,38,612 crore was less than the original budget provision of `1,62,148 crore”.

The CAG further said, “Several policy initiatives taken up by the government were either unfulfilled or partially executed primarily due to non-approval of scheme guidelines/modalities, non-commencement of works for want of administrative sanction, poor project implementation capacities apart from non-release of budget. Therefore, savings were made due to its inability to take timely action to clear bottlenecks affecting implementation of its policy decisions at the field level”.

The CAG found that despite flagging the issue repeatedly, excess expenditure of `530 crore was incurred during 2013-14 without Legislative authorisation.

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