KOCHI
Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala on Wednesday approached the Kerala High Court against the stopping of auditing of the accounts of local self-government institutions in the State for 2019-20.
In his petition, Mr. Chennithala challenged the order issued by Director, Kerala State Audit Department, in September 4 directing all heads of local bodies to stop auditing of their accounts for the financial year 2019-20.
The directive was issued on the ground that there was lack of operation guidelines on the implementation of grants on the basis of the Fifteenth Finance Commission recommendations from the Centre.
The petitioner contended that the reason given for stopping the audit of accounts was not legally and factually correct, as the Union Ministry of Finance had already issued operational guidelines for implementation on Rural Local Body(RLB) grants of the Fifteenth Finance Commission. The guidelines had been given to the State government in July itself. In fact, the Director had issued the order, suppressing the operations guidelines given the Centre. The reason given for stopping the audit, was , therefore, misleading.
The petitioner alleged that the government wanted to postpone the auditing of accounts of the local bodies till the local body and Assembly elections, because of fears of exposing corruptions in various poverty alleviation programmes and developments during auditing.
In fact, the decision to stop the audit of accounts was taken with an intention to cover up alleged corruptions in the LIFE mission and other big corruptions in various local bodies. He said the kickbacks in the LIFE Mission project had now surfaced and CBI had launched a probe into it.
If no audit of local body accounts was done, it would only pave the way for large-scale corruption and malpractices indulged in by the officials and political leader.
He sought to quash the order and direct the State government and the Director to audit the account of the local self-government institutions for the financial year 2019-2020.
