New Delhi: Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on Friday said that six private telecom companies — Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, and Aircel — understated their gross revenue by Rs 46,045 crore from 2006-07 to 2009-10 to the government, resulting in a loss of Rs 12,489 crore to the exchequer. Reacting to CAG report, telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad ordered a special audit of the telecom companies.
The new telecom policy-1999 (NTP-99) requires of telecom service providers to pay a percentage of their adjusted gross revenue (AGR) as licence fee (LF). Mobile operators are also required to pay spectrum usage charges (SUC) for the use of the radio frequency spectrum allotted to them.
“Audit observed non-compliance of the licence conditions leading to short payment of revenue share to the government,” said CAG in its report tabled in the Parliament on Friday.
CAG said that verification of records of “six private telecom service providers indicated total understatement of Rs 46,045 crore in having corresponding impact of Rs 3,752 crore on licence fee (LF) and Rs 1,460 crore on spectrum usage charge (SUC). The interest on this short/ non-payment of LF and SUC works out to Rs 7,276 crore.”
The telecom minister said that this represented the legacy of the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government.
DoT takes tough line against telecom companies
Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday ordered his officials frame new rules to prevent misreporting of revenue by telecom companies.
“I take a serious note of this. I have instructed the secretary telecom and member finance to put in place robust system to prevent any recurrence of this,” said Mr Prasad. He noted that though the CAG report will go to public accounts committee; whose recommendations will be final after the approval by the house, yet the department will take a special audit. This, he pointed out, the department is authorised to undertake under the licensing conditions to discover whether any outstanding due, which is legitimately required to be paid by the operators.
“Earlier, a special audit was done for 2006-07 and 2007-08 whereby demand of Rs 1,846 crore have been demanded from five operators namely Bharti, Reliance, Vodafone, Idea and Tata Teleservices. This is subject to litigation,” said the minister.
The financial impact due to understatement of GR stood at Rs 1,507.25 crore for Reliance Communications, Rs 1,357.68 crore for Tata Teleservices, Airtel ( Rs 1,066.95 crore), Vodafone ( Rs 749.85 crore), Idea ( Rs 423.26 crore) and Aircel ( Rs 107 crore), the CAG said.
The Comptroller and Auditor General also said that adjustment of one-time entry fee paid by telecom companies whose licences were quashed by the Supreme Court against the spectrum price they paid in 2012-13 deprived national exchequer of Rs 5,476.3 crore.
