Auditor General Akhtar Buland Rana, the person who is supposed to pinpoint the misuse of government funds at any level, has been found involved in using the official vehicles and drawing monetisation allowance simultaneously.
Complaints against him have been lodged for the alleged misuse of public funds at various forums.
A few months ago, Rana had told the Public Accounts Committee that the real issue in Pakistan was “abuse of authority”. He was defending and breaching the monetisation policy at the same time.
The salary slip of the auditor general revealed to a local newspaper which showed that he draws Rs95,910 per month as monetisation allowance. However, the auditor general also uses official vehicles, a fact that was confirmed by senior officers of audit office on the record.
Giving the official version, Deputy Auditor General Asif Ali said that it had been mentioned in the Monetisation Policy that despite the fact that a person was drawing monetisation allowance, he/she still could still use official vehicles while performing official duty.
When confronted about this strange logic and asked what the purpose of introducing the policy was, the deputy auditor general said that the cabinet secretary informed the Public Accounts Committee and that was what the policy stated.
It is worth mentioning here that the federal government approved the compulsory monetisation of transport facility for civil servants in BS-20 to BS-22, which was implemented from January 1, 2012, with the basic objective to eliminate any possibility of misuse of official vehicles, as well as, to restrict the maintenance expenditure of the vehicles to the bare minimum, which shall be used as protocol/operational duty purposes.
The government also gave the option to purchase vehicles under their use at depreciated prices, on hopes that this would stop the misuse of vehicles which is costing a minimum of Rs5 billion annually to the exchequer.
The former chairman PAC Nadeem Afzal Chan had taken notice of misuse of official vehicles by senior bureaucrats as under the policy a Grade 22 officer was receiving Rs97,000, a Grade 21 officer Rs77,000, and a Grade 20 officer Rs68,000 per month for car-related services but were also using official vehicles.
