LAHORE, Sept 22: The Punjab local government commission which met here on Friday after a lapse of three years decided to immediately seek reports of annual internal audit of all local councils and resolutions of their monthly meetings to check whether they were operating according to law or not.

It also decided that its members would visit all districts in the province to have working meetings with elected representatives of their local councils to teach them about the role of the commission. The first such working meeting would be held with the City District Government Lahore on Sept 26 (Tuesday) and the second with the Multan district government soon thereafter.

Another major decision was to summon all district and tehsil nazims to Lahore in near future to explain them actual working of their respective councils, their powers and limitations and the role of the local government commission so that they could improve their future functioning.

The commission meeting was presided over by its chairman Muhammad Basharat Raja, the local government minister, and attended by its members Riaz Ahmad Chaudhry, Muhammad Bashir Sheikh and opposition’s Muhammad Naveed Chaudhry.

Officials said the decision to seek audit reports was taken because of the complaints by the commission members that many local councils were committing financial irregularities and it was necessary to check whether they were doing this intentionally or because of a lack of knowledge of rules.

Similarly, the local councils were asked to send their resolutions regularly to the commission because its members said that in a number of cases they were adopted unilaterally by the nazims to get a free ticket for what they wanted to do no matter it was in violation of the law.

Officials said some members had during their recent field visits detected financial irregularities in eight local councils, recommending their special audit to fix responsibility. But the meeting decided to first convey to the local councils the objections so that they could be given a fair chance to explain position before any punitive action was taken against them.

The law minister agreed that the meetings of the commission should be regularly held so that it could properly play its role as defined in the Local Government Ordinance.

He explained that it was not right at the moment to punish anyone because it would discourage the local government officials. Instead the commission would play its supervisory, regulatory and reformatory role, guiding those not following the rules so that the system could move forward.

He directed the local government secretary to provide maximum logistic support to the members so that they could function without any problem. He said the government would soon appoint the fourth member.

Mr Naveed Chaudhry pointed out the rampant misuse of funds in the local councils and said the commission should take it into consideration. He said the commission should be made active to carry on the system according to rules and regulations. —Staff Reporter