INSPECTION OF CO_OPERATIVES The Ministry of Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation has said that it will complete inspection of cooperatives having annual transactions of more than Rs 50 million within this fiscal year. The ministry has planned to conduct strict inspection of big cooperatives as the government has increased the budget for monitoring almost four-fold. According to the Ministry of Cooperatives, Rs 20 million has been earmarked for monitoring for this fiscal year. The budget in the last fiscal was Rs 5.7 million. “The ministry itself will conduct inspection of 60 cooperatives by the end of the current fiscal year,” said Chandra Bahadur Thakuri, under-secretary at the ministry’s monitoring unit. Inspection of the rest of the large cooperatives will be conducted in coordination with the Department of Cooperatives and district-based cooperatives division offices. There are 566 cooperatives which carry out transactions of over Rs 50 million. Among them, around 200 cooperatives have transactions valued at more than Rs 500 million. Most of them are based in Kathmandu district. Of the 13 big cooperatives checked by the Ministry of Cooperatives last year, most of them were found to be violating the norms of the Cooperatives Standard. These cooperatives have been carrying out transactions with non-members, paying high interest rates on deposits to friends and relatives of their board members and doing transactions with people living in distant places. The ministry said that it had also started rechecking troubled cooperatives. “We have asked the department to provide details of the troubled cooperatives,” said Thakuri. As per the department, 17 cooperatives including Oriental and Exim have been declared troubled. Ten of them including Ugrachandi, Guna and Corona are from Lalitpur district. Meanwhile, the ministry has also planned to provide training to its 100 officials within the next two months to make monitoring effective. “The officials will be provided training on PEARLS monitoring, the system recommended by the World Council of Credit Unions,” he said. PEARLS stands for protection of depositors’ money, effective financial structure with lending amounting to 70-80 percent of the total assets, asset quality, rate of return and cost, adequate liquidity and sign of growth. Thakuri said they would form monitoring teams consisting of three members each. “We will include a chartered accountant in the team while carrying out inspection of cooperatives with annual transactions of over Rs 500 million,” he added. Source: The Kathmandu Post
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 02:59:59 +0000
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