Indian Express 15.10.2010
BMC hasn’t revealed budget actuals for 3 years
Express News Service Tags : Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, budget Posted: Fri Oct 15 2010, 23:19 hrs
Mumbai : The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the country’s richest civic body, has not presented an audit statement for the past three years. The last budget actuals of all civic departments were compiled and presented during the financial year of 2006-07. The issue was raised in the civic body’s general body meeting Thursday. Additional Municipal Commissioner Aseem Gupta said that due to technical glitches in the computerised accounting system the overall picture of budget actuals remains unclear.Corporators also demanded the refund of the sewerage tax, being collected under water charges and property tax, that the civic body has been collecting from citizens for over 10 years due to technical and administrative mismanagement. BJP corporator Ashish Shelar said that owing to technical glitches in the SAP computing system, the BMC has been ignorant of its actual financial position. “There is complete financial mismanagement within the BMC and this is eventually affecting the developmental activities in the city. On what basis did the civic body seek internal loans if they had no idea about the actual balance as compared to budget estimates,” asked Shelar. Municipal auditor Prashant Pisolkar said though various departments have their individual actuals recorded manually, there is no way to compile this data and therefore there was no clear-cut data available to show how much the BMC has spent and how much it has earned. “For three years we have been relying on unreconciled figures. This means we have no idea about the actual fund positions, liquidity levels etc.” said Pisolkar.
Over 13,000 persons have applied seeking refund of the excess amount in sewarage tax .Congress coprorator Rajhans Singh said that the BMC should refund the extra amount in three months.
Gupta said due to technical glitches an overall clear picture was not appearing on SAP despite accurate data entry. “We are working hard towards solving this issue. It is purely of a technical nature and hope to solve it within three months. In the case of levying of double-tax, we have refunded the amount over 90 per cent of the applications. Only 1069 cases are pending,” said Gupta.
