DoT to conduct special audit of telcos: Kamat

The government has ordered special audits of Bharti Airtel Ltd, Reliance Communications Ltd and three other telecom companies following complaints of misrepresentation of revenue.

The other three companies are Vodafone-Essar Ltd, Idea Cellular Ltd and Tata Teleservices Ltd, minister of state for communications Gurudas Kamat made a statement to this effect in the Rajya Sabha today.

The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has already issued notices on the special audit to Reliance Communications, Bharti, Vodafone and Idea while notice to Tata Teleservices is being issued, he added.

He said the government had ordered the audit on a reference against Bharti Airtel from the telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). However, he did not offer specific reasons for the audit of the other companies.

The department had announced in May that a special audit had been necessitated on a complaint from a legislator that some telecom companies were accounting revenue from mobile services in other telephony services charged at lower fees, thus causing a loss to the government.

Telecom companies in India are required to share a part of the revenue with the government. They have to pay 6 to 10 per cent of their revenue as mobile service licence fees and 2 to 6 per cent for domestic and international long-distance services, which need special licences.
According to Tata Teleservices, there has never been any misreporting of issues by the company so far and the audit order is only a part of the routine decision by the department whereby all operators are audited by independent auditors.

Kamat said the revenue to the government from telecom licence fees in the first two quarters of 2008-09 amounted to Rs4,736 crore as compared with Rs8,826 crore in the previous fiscal year ended 31 March 2008.