Excerpt from the Article on Decoding Concurrent Audit allottment by CA Amresh Vashisht
The recent Govt. directive to give the power to bank management is to appoint the statutory Auditors of their choice questions the total mess up scene created in the last four/five years. The said guidelines also authorise PSBs that progressively, the threshold level of advances may be increased so that the number of branches to be taken up for statutory audit is phased down over a period of time. -
So every stage is set to kill the branch statutory audit. This is the unique year as 60 % of the branch auditors who completed their 4 year term in the last 3 years have not got any offer from any bank. With this year completion, the banks are at safe side not to go ahead with the previous practice. It is quite interesting to note that our regulator, the premier institute of the country never raised their voice for setting aside 25% of auditors but with full energy added new firms in an annual gala function of MEF filing. This MEF has been used to polish the shattered image and to console the members of the institute who satisfy themselves seeing their names in a panel submitted by the ICAI to RBI. In the month of December, PDC the operational department for filling the empanelment has come out with a final penal to be submitted to RBI. Since December the MEF site is having a note that the panel as submitted to RBI shall be coming shortly. Two months have passed, PDC got new guards but the empanelment never surfaced again. The fate of statutory bank branch auditors is hanging in air and shall be cleared in few days. How many of us shall be able to get an offer from the bank is a million dollar question? -
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