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Most of the media reporting around the latest Comptroller and Auditor General report on Union expenditure headlines Rs 54,282 crore. The less sexy but more telling number is far smaller: Rs 27.35 crore, which the Union government says it “saved” under the Defence Pensions Grant during 2024–25.

The devil, as always, is in the detail. Read that section, and you realise that pension payments amounting to Rs 3,042.32 crore have not been included under the relevant head. Instead, that amount has been parked in an intermediary account labelled “suspense head”.

Why? Because the Defence Pensions Grant did not have sufficient funds to accommodate the payment. Had those payments been recorded where they belonged, the purported “saving” of Rs 27.35 crore would in fact have become excess expenditure of Rs 3,014.97 crore.

In other words, the government created a “saving” by the simple expedient of not counting the expenditure.

If this was a one-off, it could be explained away as being caused by the year-end rush. It is not. The CAG report says that Rs 5,195.56 crore in pension payments was kept out of the final account in 2022–23, and Rs 2,441.74 crore was similarly kept out of the accounting in 2023-24, both using the same technique.

In each case, the government carried over the expenditure to the following year, thus understating expenditure in the year in which the money was actually spent.

To be clear, the CAG does not say the money has disappeared – pensioners have been paid their dues. The underlying point is that it is parliament that sanctions budgets and in return, the government is obligated to provide an accurate accounting of how that money was spent.

In this instance, parliament has repeatedly been given an inaccurate account of what has been spent against what it had authorised.

The media focus on the one large figure – Rs 54,282.32 crore in supposedly “unaccounted expenditure” – makes the point while missing the point. The problem is not “unaccounted” expenditure; the issue is lack of paperwork. The sum in question represents grants for which as many as 33,973 utilisation certificates were outstanding as of March 31, 2025. A utilisation certificate is the confirmation, in prescribed format, that money released as a grant was used for the purpose for which it was sanctioned.

The absence of such certification does not prove that the money was stolen – for all we know, receipts and other pertinent records may exist. What the CAG points to is that the government has not been able to provide the prescribed assurance that the money was used for the purpose that parliament authorised.

Put simply, the report does not suggest the money has been stolen. Rather, it suggests that the audit trail is broken, and that is serious enough to merit headlines.

Stay with that headline figure for a beat longer. Of the amount in question, Rs 38,287.52 crore – that is 70% – relates to the three most recent financial years. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs accounts for Rs 18,272.91 crore, and the Ministry for Higher Education for another Rs 14,359.76 crore.

Note that the topline figure of Rs 54,282.32 is based on information provided by only 15 ministries and departments, out of a total of 54 Union ministries. As many as 39 ministries have not been heard from, which means the final figure could be considerably higher.

Of the 15 ministries that did report, 10 responded to the CAG’s questions with variations of a familiar response: the matter was being pursued, implementing agencies had been reminded, continuous efforts were being made, a technological system had been developed to monitor the certificates.

Five ministries did not respond to the CAG’s questions.

In summary, 35 ministries have not submitted relevant reports; the 15 ministries that did submit reports could not provide relevant documentation of how the money was spent; of these 15, ten provided boilerplate responses to the CAG’s questions while five ministries did not even bother to respond.

The CAG report notes........

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