Government sets deadline for PR audition

Hyderabad: The State government directed the senior officials of the Panchayat Raj department to complete the audition of 13,500 Panchayat Raj institutions in the State, by the end of March. This directive comes after Central government imposing conditions to performance grants under the 14th Finance Commission.

There are 660 intermediate and 12,918 village panchayats in the State and auditing of some of them has been pending for years, which has become a major hurdle to draw the performance grants from the Centre. As per the new stipulations, “The performance grants will be released from the financial year 2016-17, on certification of Ministry of Panchyat Raj (MoPR), after the panchayats submit audited accounts for the year, not earlier than two years preceding the year, in which it seeks to claim the performance grant.

The audit report should be furnish to the Commissioner, every year before 31st December”. The new Central government stipulations state that the panchayats will have to show an increase in their own revenues over the preceding years, as reflected in the audited accounts. Also, the performance grants are designed to serve the purpose of ensuring reliable audited accounts and date of receipts and expenditure and improvement in Own Source of Revenue (OSR).

“The gram panchayats should also adopt the model accounting system and upload the data in ‘PRIA’ software and there should not be any proved misappropriation of funds in the audited year. Further, the panchayats should conduct four statutory gram sabhas and minutes of the same should be displayed online Panchayat Raj department’s website,” a senior official with Panchayat Raj said.

According to the new directives, all mandatory provisions should be uploaded in the websites of the departments concerned at the State and Centre levels. Basing on the data, the panchayats would be given grades.