LAHORE, April 2: Four provincial departments claim to have updated their accounts and reconciled cent per cent with the office of the Accountant General, Punjab.

The departments, according to a Finance Department official, include the Board of Revenue and the Excise and Taxation, the Forests, the Fisheries, and the Health Departments.

The official said the reconciliation of accounts was effected at a meeting of the Punjab Fiscal Monitoring Committee attended by Finance Minister Tariq Hamid, AG Wazir Ahmad Qureishi, the administrative secretaries and additional secretaries of various departments and officials from the Finance Department and the AG’s Office.

The finance minister expressed his satisfaction over the development and urged the remaining departments to get their accounts reconciled at the earliest.

It may be mentioned here that the provincial AG had ordered on March 22 to block all contingency payments, except utility bills, to the departments which had not reconciled 100 per cent of their accounts for the first eight months of the current fiscal year.

The AG had also ordered blocking of the salaries of the drawing and disbursing officers concerned whose accounts were not reconciled cent per cent. The orders were, however, put on a hold till April 15 last week after the provincial administration approached the AG and requested him to allow some time to the departments to get their accounts updated and reconciled.

The order blocking contingency expenses and salaries of the DDOs was issued because the departments, their principal accounting officers (administrative secretaries) and the DDOs concerned had utterly failed to get their accounts reconciled on a monthly basis despite repeated reminders to them issued by the AG in this regard. Even the exhortation by the finance minister had failed to produce the desired result.

The departments are bound, according to the sources in the AG’s Office, to get their accounts/expenditure reconciled every month.

The Chief Executive’s Secretariat has already issued orders to the federal as well as provincial departments in this regard.

The provincial departments had got reconciled only 11 per cent of their accounts during January 2002.

The AG’s Office had paid the departments about Rs17.558 billion during the month but accounts for only Rs1.923 billion were reconciled.

Similarly, the departments had achieved only 64 per cent reconciliation for December, 47 per cent for November, 52 per cent for October, 67 per cent for September, 60 per cent for August and 70 per cent for July (the first half of the current financial year).

The defaulters include the chief secretary and almost all administrative secretaries, including the finance secretary.