LAHORE, May 9: The Accountant General’s Office and district accounts offices will receive only salary and utility bills after June 15 and stop receiving even utility bills after June 21. Only salary cheques will be issued from these offices after June 25. According to an AG office circular issued here on Monday, no payments will be made to the government departments, autonomous and semi-autonomous bodies failing to provide complete information regarding the number of motor-vehicles, consumption of petrol and diesel, expenditure incurred on telephone bills of offices and residences of government officials, strength of employees sanctioned by the finance department and reconciliation of their accounts. Even the salaries of the drawing and disbursing officers of such departments would be stopped from next month pending the complete reconciliation of accounts, the circular added.
The AG Office has fixed the last dates for receipt of the bills to ensure that all the cheques issued against current financial year’s budget allocations are issued well in time for encashment before the commencement of the next financial year and the need for issuing alternative cheques does not arise.
Presiding over the weekly review meeting here on Monday, AG Wazir Ahmed Qureshi directed the officials to scrutinize all the bills received during June in detail as many departments tried to show utilization of their entire pending budgets by submitting bogus bills. There was a marked increase in the number of bills received from the government departments as a result. He said that all the bogus and doubtful bills should be returned.