Govt. plans to outsource cooperative audit, says Minister

The State government plans to outsource the process of audit of cooperative societies, said Laxman Savadi, Minister for cooperation, said in Athani, on Tuesday.

“There are thousands of cooperative societies in the State. All of them need to be audited once a year. The Cooperative Audit Department in the Ministry of Cooperation is understaffed and overworked. The department will therefore train commerce and management graduates in cooperative audit and issue them licences so that they can be gainfully employed and that the delays in cooperative audits are avoided,” Mr. Savadi said.

“The Revenue Department has outsourced land survey by issuing licences to private surveyors. We want to replicate that in our ministry. A few years ago, I started the process of liberalising the audit process. The earlier rules said only government auditors had to conduct the audit. We allowed private chartered accountants and licensed auditors to take it up. Now, we want to further liberalise it, the Minister said.

He said that as per the current trend, chartered accountants get the audit done by their juniors and then only sign the documents later. We want to bring in a parallel arrangement. Outsourcing will create thousands of jobs for the unemployed commerce graduates, Mr. Savadi said.

We will set up training centres in eight places. These centres will utilise the education fund that is paid by the society’s profits. I think the fund has around ₹90 crore. We will give training free of cost to the poor and charge nominal fees to the rest,” the Minister said.