India News | Get Proactive Disclosure of Information Mandatorily Audited by Third Party: Centre to All Its Departments

New Delhi, Sep 16 (PTI) The Centre has asked all departments under it to get suo motu disclosure of public information mandatorily audited by a third party, according to an order issued by the personnel ministry.

All government departments are mandated to put most of the information related to their functioning, duties and the records held by them in the public domain.

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Citing its guidelines issued in 2013 and 2019 regarding suo motu disclosure under section 4 of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, the order said each ministry and public authority should get its proactive disclosure package audited by a third party every year.

The audit should cover compliance with the proactive disclosure guidelines as well as adequacy of the items included in the package, the order said.

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It should examine whether there are any other types of information that could be proactively disclosed.

Such audit should be done annually and communicated to the Central Information Commission (CIC) through publication on their own websites.

Further, the task of undertaking transparency audits may be given to the respective training institutes under each ministry or department or public authority and across the states and Union territories, the order said.

However, in cases where no training institute exists under the ministries or departments or public authorities, the task of undertaking transparency audits may be given to any government training institute, it added.

According to the annual CIC report for 2020-21, it has been observed that of the 2,275 public authorities registered with the commission, only 754 have been reported to get their proactive disclosure audited by a government training institute, which has been viewed seriously by the Centre.

This issue has also come to the notice of the Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee that has voiced concern over the poor implementation of the third-party audit of the suo motu disclosure by public authorities (PAs).

It is desired that all the ministries and departments and the PAs under their administrative control may take immediate appropriate action and furnish the requisite details as well as adhere to the timelines for suo motu disclosures in letter and spirit, read the order issued to all central government departments.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)