below the line. Questions for auditors

Was there a CVC guidelines breach at PNB’s Brady House branch in Mumbai from where the fraudulent ‘Letter of Undertakings’ was issued?

If PNB insiders are to be believed, Deputy Manager Gokulnath Shetty — allegedly the main perpetrator of this fraudulent act — had been posted in the branch from March 31, 2010, till he retired on May 31, 2017. He worked in the foreign exchange department looking after the import section. Why was he not shifted from this post or transferred out of this mid-corporate branch even once in the seven-year period? Maybe international banking/forex skills are so limited that the PNB management didn’t find a replacement to effect the necessary job rotation!

The other puzzling question is how the internal audit did not want to do reconciliation of the Nostro accounts of PNB held with the overseas branches of Indian banks.

The otherwise buzzing corridors of the finance ministry have been rather silent on the PNB scam. If one goes by purely the years in the making of the scam, both UPA and NDA fall prey, as also some high profile officials in the finance ministry as well as the RBI. Hence, the resounding silence!

The expat CEO fraternity has been closely watching the Indian market undergoing the transition towards GST.

Some of them have expressed surprise over the resistance and inertia shown by Indian consumers and smaller businesses to deal with these changes. They believe that in other international markets the transition has been far smoother. Also, they are surprised that consumer purchasing power has been subdued. One of the expat CEOs recently quipped that with elections coming, this government will need to be careful.

In what could have been the biggest funding of its kind in the world, India and the New Development Bank signed a $100-billion loan agreement for the Rajasthan water sector restructuring project for desert areas. But a subsequent correction issued by Ministry of Finance threw cold water on this. The humble ‘b’ in billion was replaced by the more moderate ‘m’, drastically bringing down the billions of dollars to a more modest millions. The finance ministry press release also revealed that another $345 billion had been revised to $345 million.

The UP government has been on overdrive to make Lucknow presentable for the much-awaited Investors’ Summit 2018. Now, unlike more modern and planned cities, Lucknow has a network of large open drains crisscrossing the city. Such is the obsession with ensuring that everything is presentable that even these drains are being painted so they appear less dismal. Whether these measures will attract the moolah the State needs for development is something only time will tell.

The Goods and Services Tax has raised enough eyebrows and elicited countless frowns over the input credit denial and return filing errors. But chartered accountants are realising that they must meet with yet another nemesis stemming from the all powerful GSTN-figure reconciliation.

Simply put, if an error is made while inputting the details of a transaction, it is very difficult to correct it in all parts of the tax return at once. This is because there are glitches that prevent the synchronisation of values during correction. Another flagged concern is the missing ‘invoice value’ column in later forms. Only if the accountant matches this with the ‘invoice value’ fed in earlier on a parallel excel sheet will it make sense. As if there were not enough problems concerning GSTN already.

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