Kathmandu. The Ministry of Finance has given a transfer of Rs 3.15 billion and additional disbursement to the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport. The Ministry of Finance has authorized the spending of a large amount from outside the budget.
According to Ministry of Finance sources, the budget has been approved for payments even for projects that have not received source approval. Payments for projects that were contracted without obtaining approval from the Ministry of Finance have been stalled for a long time. Although Finance Minister Bishnu Prasad Poudel is preparing to take a proposal to the Council of Ministers for the payment of such projects, the proposal has not been submitted to the Council of Ministers so far.
After the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure approved a large transfer of Rs 3.15 billion in Falgun, employees of the ministry have raised questions about the work of the Budget Division. An employee said that the Budget Division has not moved forward legally. The employee told Singha Durbar, “The work of the Budget Division is not in the hands of the employees at the moment. The amount and resource transfers of the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure and Transport and the Ministry of Urban Development will be known when the project is examined.”
The employee claimed that the employees of the Budget Division took a big risk for a small gain. The issue of money transfers and resource transfers in itself is not a bad issue. But the employee claims that there is ample room for suspicion in the planned transfers. The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority had filed a case against the then Budget Division Chief and former Finance Secretary Madhu Kumar Marasini, alleging that he had paid the project from outside the budget. The commission, which has filed a case against Marasini, has also sent a 21-point warning letter to the Ministry of Finance to prevent arbitrary payments.
This is how irregularities occur in the Budget Division
Any project can be taken to the contract process only after all preparations are completed. But most agencies take contracts for amounts that are not recognized in the annual budget or that exceed the budget allocation. In this way, those bodies propose to proceed with the contract process of a poor plan without completing the contract process of a good plan and transfer the unspent amount of a good project to a poor project after the end of the year.
In this way, the proposals that come to the Ministry of Finance are screened by the ministry’s employees and the transfer of funds is approved only after checking. That is, is the project included in the budget or not? Has it been approved by the Ministry of Finance or not. Whether the work of the organization is in accordance with the rules or not, they sign the payment only after checking all the facts.
Generally, the Deputy Secretary and officers of the Budget Division do not sign the payment for the work done without taking approval from the Ministry of Finance. But there are allegations that the Budget Division is working on the setting. Currently, the Deputy Secretary in charge of the Ministry of Physical Planning is Gauri Shankar Upadhyay. He is retiring in a few months. Similarly, Tirtharaj Baral is in charge of the Ministry of Urban Development. Keshav Kumar Upreti is in charge of the Central Budget. Joint Secretary Shree Krishna Nepal is the head of the Budget Division. He has made a budget and is planning to go to the Asian Development Bank for a job.
This is the details of the transfer
प्रतिक्रिया दिनुहोस्