JOIN USA former lead auditor involved in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s (CAG) report on 2G scam on Tuesday told a Parliamentary panel that his immediate superiors had asked him to recommend the name of a field officer, assigned to collect data for the report, for a foreign posting.
Deposing before the Joint Parliamentary Committee on 2G, former DG, Audit (Post and Telecom) R P Singh said that his immediate bosses had asked him to suggest the name of field officer Rajendra Kumar for a posting abroad.
Rajendra Kumar is learnt to have done most of the legwork to prepare the report. After the meeting, some Congress members dubbed the recommendation as an “allurement”.
Singh also claimed that while the loss figure calculated by him was Rs 36,000 crore, the CAG final report mentioned it at Rs 1.76 lakh crore.
In response to a volley of questions as to why did he not report his disagreement on the issue of presumptive loss, Singh said, though he had met the CAG Vinod Rai several times during the preparation of the report and even before its finalisation, he never got a chance to “reveal” his mind on the issue.
He, however, added that he had expressed his disagreement in writing to his immediate superiors, Deputy CAG Rekha Gupta (now retired) and R B Sinha. Singh told the panel that the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman Murli Manohar Joshi had interacted with CAG officials on 2G spectrum report and discussed the loss figure with them.
Singh said he had met Joshi at his residence and during his interaction with CAG officials the loss figure had come up. Joshi has dismissed allegations that he tried to influence the outcome of the report, saying these were aimed at maligning institutions such as the CAG and the PAC.