Govt. plans to outsource cooperative audit, says Minister

Laxman Savadi, Minister for Cooperation, announced on Tuesday that the State government plans to outsource the auditing process for cooperative societies. He made the announcement in Athani. The Cooperative Audit Department in the Ministry of Cooperation is currently understaffed and overworked, and needs to audit thousands of cooperative societies annually.

To address this issue, Savadi proposed training commerce and management graduates as cooperative auditors and issuing them licenses. This would alleviate the department's workload and create job opportunities for unemployed graduates. The Revenue Department has already outsourced land surveying to private surveyors, and Savadi hopes to replicate this model for cooperative audits.

He stated that the current trend sees chartered accountants delegating the bulk of the audit work to their junior staff before signing off on the final documents. Savadi aims to introduce a parallel arrangement by outsourcing this aspect of the audit process. To fund the initiative, the government will utilize the education fund generated by cooperative societies' profits, which he estimated to be around ₹90 crore.

Training centers will be established in eight locations, offering free training to the poor and nominal fees for others.