In an extraordinary turn of events, institutions under the Department of Cooperation have come in for sharp criticism from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) for alleged non-cooperation with a Subject Specific Compliance Audit (SSCA).
In a report for the period ended March 2024 tabled in the Assembly earlier this week, the CAG noted that “all through the course of the SSCA, audit encountered persistent non-production of essential records/critical information by the audited institutions at all levels.”
Conducted from July 2024 to February 2025, the SSCA covered the period from 2019-20 to 2023-24. The SSCA evaluated the regulation of 16,393 cooperative societies under the Kerala Co-operative Societies Act and Rules. Apart from the Cooperation department’s office at the Secretariat, the audit team had paid visits to the offices of the Registrar of Cooperative Societies (RCS), those of the directors of Coir and Dairy Development as well as the district and taluk-level cooperative institutions in Thiruvananthapuram, Alappuzha, Thrissur, and Kannur districts.
The CAG report says that the audit team was “denied access” to the dump database of the Integrated Cooperative Database Management System (ICDMS), the online platform developed as part of the department’s modernisation.
