Varsity funds used to fuel cars of senior AIOU officials

Audit finds QAU vice chancellor received house rent despite living in govt quarter

ISLAMABAD: A recent audit report has found irregularities in the accounts of both, Allama Iqbal Open University and Quaid-i-Azam University in the capital.

Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) paid Rs4.36 million to its officers who were working in basic pay scale (BPS) grades 20-22 as reimbursements for fueling up their private cars during the fiscal year 2014-15.

This was discovered in the audit report of the Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP). Submitted to the parliament recently, the report pointed out the irregularity was ‘unauthorised’.

“Audit is of the view that reimbursement of POL charges to the university employees for their private vehicles without approval from Finance Division was irregular and unauthorised,” the audit report said.

However, it was not immediately clear how many officers had received funds for gassing up their private cars.

The AGP cited general financial rules which state that allowances granted to meet the expenditure of a particular type should be so regulated that the allowances are not, on the whole, a source of profit to the recipients.



The auditor general in his report has recommended that the difference between conveyance allowance which these officers were entitled to and the amounts reimbursed to them should be recovered from such officers.

QAU VC having his cake and eating it too

The AGP has discovered that the Quaid-i-Azam Univerity (QAU) Vice-Chancellor (VC) Dr Javed Ashraf has been living in a government house since his appointment as VC in 2014, despite that, he has been drawing house rent allowance worth Rs65,000 every month.

The AGP explained that a VC is entitled to a basic salary equivalent to that of a professor working on a tenure-track system. Moreover, they receive an additional VC allowance which amounts to 20 per cent of their basic salary.

Additionally, a VC also gets transport and medical facilities – which are normally reserved for BPS- 22 officers.

However, Dr Ashraf, who had been appointed as QAU’s vice chancellor on October 13, 2014, was found to drawing a house rent allowance while living in the university’s residential colony.

“Audit is of the view that non-recovery of house rent allowance from the vice-chancellor was irregular and unauthorised which resulted in the loss of Rs1.23 million to the university,” the report said.

The VC was found to have been drawing the allowance from November 2014 to May 2016.

The auditors have recommended that the VC should return this money to the university.

The university management accepted the audit’s observation but a departmental account committee was not convened till the audit report had been finalised.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2017.