State set to lose control over funds with panchayats

Ongole: The panchayat raj and rural development commissioner Kona Sasidhar ordered the chief executive officers of the zilla parishad and district panchayat officers to open separate accounts in the Union Bank of India by the panchayats, mandal parishads and zilla parishads immediately. He informed them that the Central government will transfer the funds recommended by the 15th Finance Commission to the new accounts from now on.

The commissioner explained in a memo sent to the officials on December 1, that the Government of India has put in place a robust system for effective monitoring of the public expenditure by through a holistic system capturing the entire activity from the stage of planning to monitor various stages of work, recording the expenditure and complete details of the assets created.

He said in the memo that to monitor the funds' flow, the Union government mandated the utilisation of the Public Financial Management System (PFMS) and its integration with the e-GramSwaraj software for real-time payments to the service providers and vendors.

To implement this, the commissioner informed the officers that they should procure Class-3 signing and encrypted digital signature certificate tokens for the panchayat secretaries as the makers of bills and sarpanches as the approving authority in respect of panchayats, administrative officers of MPDO offices as maker and MPDO as the approver in respect of mandal parishads, and administrative officer of accounts section in ZP as the maker and deputy CEO of ZP as the approver in respect of zilla parishads. He ordered them to open accounts in the Union Bank of India and complete integration with PFMS immediately, and no deposits should be made by authorities into those accounts.

Prakasam district panchayat officer G V Narayana Reddy said that the account opening process is underway in the district. He said that with the new accounts at the Union Bank of India, the panchayats will directly receive the 15th Finance Commission funds and the state government has no control over them, as the PFMS is integrated. He explained that once they are satisfied with the works done, the panchayat secretaries will prepare the bills and the sarpanches will approve them, to release the amount to the concerned contractor or vendor.