Parliamentary Panel for shifting fiscal year to
January-December
New
Delhi: India should shift to the January - December financial
year by
ending the decades old tradition of April - March fiscal
introduced by
the British, a Parliamentary Panel said today.
The present system
was adopted by the Government of India in 1867 principally to
align the
Indian financial year with that of the British government.
Prior to
1867, the financial year in India used to commence on May 1
and end on
April 30 of the following year.
Criticising the Finance Ministry
for "hastening" the exercise of Budget presentation, the
Standing
Committee on Finance, chaired by Congress MP M Veerappa Moily,
said
"greater preparation and adequate groundwork should have been
made"
before preponing Budget by a month.
"The Committee would thus
expect a more thorough exercise next year onwards. Keeping in
view the
above constraints, the Committee would suggest that the
financial year
may also be correspondingly shifted to calendar year and the
budget date
be further advanced correspondingly," it said.
It concurred with
the government's decision to advance budget date to end
financial
business of the government before March 31 so that the
respective
ministries are able to spend their allocated money from the
beginning of
the financial year.
Ending the decades old practice of presenting
Union Budget on the last working day of February, the
government
presented the Budget for 2017-18 on February 1.
"The Committee,
however, finds that shifting the Budget by one month leads to
non-availability of comparative data for almost a quarter and
in the
process the utilisation of funds, achievement of physical and
financial
targets cannot be determined," the report said.
The government had
last year appointed a high-level committee to study the
feasibility of
shifting financial year to January 1 from the current practice
of
starting the fiscal from April 1. The panel submitted its
report to the
Finance Minister in December.
A Niti Aayog panel, headed by its
member Bibek Debroy, had also reportedly favoured following
the calendar
year as the financial year.
A change in financial year would require amendments in various
statutes and changes in tax laws during the transitional
period.
The
Standing Committee also highlighted “inconsistencies” in
budget
allocation and occurrence of wide variations between the
budget
estimates and actuals of various departments.
Giving instances of
inconsistent budgeting and recurring occurrences of wide
variation
between the budget estimates, revised estimates and actuals,
it said the
budgetary exercise should have been done with greater due
diligence.
"The
Committee would once again urge that the standard rules and
guidelines
may be strictly applied and if required, objective parameters
may be
devised for this purpose so as to avoid inconsistencies and
mismatch in
their estimates in future and put forth realistic and need
based
demands," it said.
PTI
