Kerala HC directs Principal Accountant General, KSDA Senior Deputy Director to appear over irregularities in Guruvayoor Devaswom Audit
The Kerala High Court has directed the Senior Deputy Director, Kerala State Audit department, to appear in person and report on the current status of
The Kerala High Court has directed the Senior Deputy Director, Kerala State Audit department, to appear in person and report on the current status of the audit of the Guruvayur Devaswom Board. In addition, the Principal Accountant General (Accounts & Entitlements), Kerala, has been asked to inform whether the audit deficiencies identified by the Kerala State Audit Department (KSDA) of the Guruvayur Devaswom Board in 2023 had been satisfactorily addressed. The Audit department had reported to the court that the Board had failed to formulate a ‘flawless system’, resulting in accounting difficulties, while implementing modern technology to facilitate cashless transactions and speedy assistance to devotees in vazhipadu collection.
The department was not informed regarding the operating procedures and cyber security protocols of the software. Further, no training or demonstration was provided to the Statutory Audit Wing in this regard. It was also reported that the accounting rules were not formulated for the transactions, there were delays in the submission of annual accounts, the valuables were not subjected to annual physical verification, and that login details were not provided for software-based online receipts. Objections not closed yet From the affidavits produced in 2023, the court observed that the audit objections for the years 2002-03 to 2019-20, involving crores of rupees, were still not closed.
Moreover, it was reported that even after the lapse of 43 years from the formulation of Guruvayur Devaswom Rules, 1980, physical verification of movable properties, including jewels and gold, had not been conducted. It was also stated that valuables received as offerings, other than gold and silver, such as huge bronze vessels, Kashmiri saffron, etc., costing lakhs of rupees, were not being entered
into appropriate registers by the Board. In this regard, the Division Bench of Justices Raja Vijayaraghavan and K.V. Jayakumar directed the Guruvayur Devaswom Managing Committee to engage an institutional consultant to undertake a comprehensive study of the existing administrative and financial processes and to recommend the adoption of suitable software solutions to integrate the various functions of the Board into a seamless digital platform.
The BriefWire