New Delhi: The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on Friday said that six private telecom operators understated their revenues by over Rs 61,000 crore between FY11 and FY15, resulting in short payment of nearly Rs 7,700 crore in statutory dues to the government. If Rs 4,531.62 crore of interest on short payment from the private operators is also added, the total loss to the Central exchequer comes to Rs 12,229 crore, the CAG said.
The report covers Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea, RCom, Aircel for the period of FY11 to FY15 and Sistema Shyam from FY07 to FY15.
The CAG said that these companies understated their revenues by accounting adjustments for commission or discount paid to their distributors, promotional schemes like free talk time and discounts to post-paid subscribers and on roaming services.
Telcos not conforming to deal: CAG
The New Telecom Policy-1999, in April 1999 introduced the revenue sharing regime in the Indian telecom sector under which telecom service providers have to pay a percentage of their adjusted gross revenue (AGR) as annual licence fee to the government. In addition, mobile telephone operators were also required to pay Spectrum Usage Charges (SUC) for the use of radio frequency spectrum allotted to them.
The CAG said Airtel owes to the government Rs 2,602.24 crore in licence fee and spectrum usage charge (SUC) for FY11 to FY15. It owes another Rs 1,245.91 crore in interest. Vodafone dues totalled Rs 3,331.79 crore including Rs 1,178.84 crore in interest. For Idea, the statutory dues stood at Rs 1,136.29 crore plus Rs 657.88 crore in interest. Anil Ambani-led RCom owed a total of Rs 1,911.17 crore (including Rs 839.09 crore interest), Aircel Rs 1,226.65 crore and SSTL Rs 116.71 crore.
In its report, CAG said the gross revenue (GR) of the licensee operator, as per the licence agreement with telecom department, prohibits any set-offs of related expenditure from revenue and norms for preparation of the accounts for payment of revenue share are built into the agreement.
“We observed non-conformities with conditions of licence agreement in the accounts prepared by all the six operators covered in the audit due to which their GR computed for sharing revenue with the government was understated,” it said.
