Times View

NEW DELHI: A significant part of the cesses and other levies that you pay the government have remained unutilised or have been diverted for other purposes, the federal auditor has noted and questioned the rationale of imposing such levies.The comptroller and auditor general ( CAG ), in its comments on the Union Accounts for 2014-15, has listed half a dozen such funds the government has created over the past decade where amounts to the tune of around Rs 3 lakh crore have been collected. The auditor has observed that these funds, meant for specific social causes, have been diverted to other uses or simply remained unutilised though taxpayers had to suffer the additional burden.The last such levy imposed on taxpayers was in November this year — a 0.5% Swachh Bharat cess on all services liable to service tax . The proceeds, according to the government, will be used for financing and promoting Swachh Bharat initiatives.For instance, according to CAG, between 2002-03 and 2014-15, the department of telecom collected Rs 66,117 crore towards the Universal Service Obligation (USO) fund but spent only Rs 26,983 crore for the purpose. More than Rs 39,134 crore was not even transferred to the USO fund and may have been diverted for other purposes. The USO was set up to provide the rural population access to telephone and broadband services. While private companies may have reached many remote parts with broadband services, state-owned enterprises fell short of their obligation.Similarly, the government collected Rs 4,900 crore towards the Research and Development cess between 1996-97 and 2013-14, of which only Rs 542 crore was utilised towards the objectives, CAG noted.“Scrutiny of the finance accounts (between 2004 and 2015) showed that against the collection of Rs 1,54,818 crore of primary education cess, only Rs 1,41,520 crore was transferred for its use,” the auditor has said, questioning the decision not to transfer the remaining Rs 13,298 crore towards the purpose it was collected for.The Secondary and Higher Education Cess (SHEC) was introduced in 2007. Though the government collected over Rs 64,000 crore under this head between 2006 and 2015, there was lack of transparency in its use. Unlike the creation of the PSK (prarambhik siksha kosh) for the primary and elementary education cess, there was no fund designated for the proceeds of SHEC nor were any schemes identified on which the cess proceeds were to be spent.“Consequently, the commitment of furthering secondary and higher education as envisaged in the Finance Act was not transparently ascertainable from the Union Accounts. Thus, the possibility of the diversion of funds for purposes not mandated under the Finance Act cannot be ruled out,” CAG commented.The auditor has said that the government has remained indifferent to observations made by the CAG and even the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee despite the fact that these facts have been brought to its notice every year for at least the past five years.The CAG is raising a point it has itself made in the past and one that this newspaper has repeatedly raised as well. Acess ought to be an instrument of last resort for a government since in most cases what it is meant to fund is part of what any reasonable person would consider the core duties of a government – ensuring everybody has a basic decent education or good roads, for instance. Governments, unfortunately, have seldom stuck to that principle, using every pretext to impose a cess. But even worse is the fact that money thus collected from the taxpayer doesn’t even go towards the intended purpose. This is betrayal of the taxpayer’s faith and must stop.