Tarun Sharma Moneycontrol News
The Central Bureau of Investigation is intensifying their scrutiny on the auditors of Punjab National Bank in the case pertaining to a Rs 12,700 crore fraud. The CBI has questioned two statutory auditors of the bank after quizzing three others on Monday, a senior CBI official told Moneycontrol.
“The agency is probing whether there is any connivance between bank officials and auditors as a fraud has surfaced despite multiple audits — internal, external and by the Reserve Bank of India,” another CBI official said.
The scrutiny is intensifying on other fronts too. An official of another investigative agency said: “An internal auditor and RBI-appointed auditors who have screened the bank’s branches are under the scanner and in coming days will be called for questioning.”
As of May 2017, PNB’s auditors are Chhajed & Doshi, R Devendra Kumar & Associates, Hem Sandeep & Co, Suri & Co and SPMG & Co. The bank had four external auditors named in its FY17 annual report FY17. In FY12, the auditors were V K Verma & Co Mookherjee Biswas & Pathak Amit Ray & Co Sarda & Pareek Borkar & Muzumdar G S and Madhava Rao & Co.
The Enforcement Directorate and Serious Fraud Investigation Office too will start questioning auditors soon. It is not the first time when auditors are in the scanner of probe agencies. Audit lapses have been found in major cases like Satyam, National Spot Exchange and Kingfisher.
Last week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had blamed inadequate oversight by regulators and auditors as well as sloppy bank management for the Rs 12,700-crore fraud at India's second-largest state-owned lender, and said if needed law would be tightened to punish fraudsters.
Jaitley had said that "the supervisory agencies" needed to "introspect as what are the additional mechanisms they have to put in place to ensure that stray cases don't become a pattern again". "It is incumbent on us as a state ... to chase these people to the last possible conclusion to make sure the country is not cheated," he had said.
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