MARGAO
Even as former Margao Municipal Council Chairperson Ganashyam Shirodkar sought the intervention of Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to order an audit of the Margao Municipal finances, Director of Municipal Administration Gurudas Pilarnekar said his office has written to the government to get the accounts department conduct audit of all the municipal bodies.
Pilarnekar said that audit of the municipal bodies could not take place for the last four years after the Director of Municipal Administration was asked to conduct the audit of the councils. “We could not audit the accounts of the municipal bodies for the last four years since we have no wherewithal to conduct the exercise. Hence, we have now asked the government to conduct the audit by the Directorate of Accounts as was the practice all these years”, Pilarnekar said.
Earlier in the day, the former MMC Chairperson Shirodkar told the media that the absence of audit of the municipal bodies will only give room for corruption. “This is totally unacceptable since the audit of the MMC accounts ha not been done for the last four years. We have no idea how much funds were received by the MMC and how much has been spent and how much funds have been returned to the government. We have information that the MMC was in the past directed to return the unutilized funds. All these things will come into public domain only if an audit is done”, he said.
Saying the city fathers were not given a copy of the audit report at the time of discussing the budget estimates, Shirodkar said the Chief Minister should intervene in the matter, adding “otherwise, an impression will gain ground that the government is also not interested in checking corruption in the civic bodies”.
