MUMBAI: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has appointed Ernst & Young (EY) to audit spending by advertising, media planning and buying and other communication agencies that crafted and rolled out its advertising and marketing campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.Further, EY has also been tasked to come up with a credible independent estimate of the amount spent by the then Opposition party in its path-breaking publicity campaign, which is widely seen to have contributed to its historic victory.The firm was appointed in the first week of May.The audit process that is now underway started at the end of the month, said two people aware of the ongoing review. The BJP has conducted similar audits in the past, but these were carried out in-house."This year from the very beginning we had decided to appointed third party auditors to carry out a professional review of our expenses. So we ran three rounds of audit. One was an internal audit. Second, we appointed Proof of Performance (PoP), an agency which monitors out-of-home campaigns, to continuously monitor our outdoor campaigns and they came on-board immediately after we broke the campaign. And now we have Ernst & Young to ensure that all the expenditure has been correctly accounted for," said a member of the publicity committee of BJP who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The objective of this audit is to document expenses and submit it to the Election Commission. (EC)."Since we worked with a series of agencies, it is important to check if there was any bungling as far as money is concerned or if we have been overcharged on some of the campaigns," said the BJP official.Because of its ubiquity and scale -- when compared to the ad campaign of the Congress --there has been intense speculation on the size of the BJP’s advertising budget. Some media reports have speculated that the party may have spent as much as Rs 5,000 crore. The official in the BJP’s publicity committee described such numbers as way off the mark."For this election we have bought media worth Rs 300-400 crore. Even if we add our creative expenses to this and the money that we spent on the onground activities, it won't add up to this obscene amount and that's why it was important for us to appoint an external agency," says the official.When asked if the BJP will make the audit report public, the official says the party will have to decide.Explaining the rationale for appointing E&Y, Sam Balsara, CMD, Madison World, the media-buying agency of BJP said the purpose of the exercise was to record and document the BJP’s strategy."E&Y has been appointed to record and document the entire BJP strategy, the execution and to come up with an overall paper on how the campaign was created, planned, executed. They asked us for some information and we have already provided that. It is an internal assessment of sorts," Balsara said."I think this is the first time an audit of this type is being done by a political party," he added. While Madison handled media buying, creative work was done by Soho Square (a subsidiary of O&M) and TAG (a subsidiary of McCann Worldgroup).Mails to E&Y and Soho Square, which is one of the advertising agencies of BJP, did not elicit any response. Prasoon Joshi, executive chairman, McCann WorldGroup, who wrote the anthem the BJP used during the campaign, could not be reached as he was out of the country. Harjaap Singh, MD, Proof of Performance confirmed that the third party audit of the outdoor campaign was monitored by them."We covered 50-60 towns and cities in 6 weeks and to my mind, this is the largest outdoor audit that India has ever seen," he said. "Our task was to ensure that the right campaign is put out in the right constituency. The party also changed the creatives very frequently and we used to monitor that and send recce reports everyday by 3am," he added.