DoT to appoint special auditors for 4 telcos

The Department of Telecom (DoT) will appoint special auditors this week to verify the revenue figures of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Idea Cellular and Tata's telecom companies, which operate in different areas of communications.

The special auditors will be from the CAG panel, a senior DoT official told PTI .

These auditors will have to give an undertaking to DoT about their previous clients. If they have worked in any of these companies previously, then they would not be engaged in the auditing, the official said.

DoT's special auditing is for those companies which have multiple licences-- UASL and LND, ILD, IP and ISP. These four companies have all these licenses.

DoT's move comes after telecom regulator recommended appointment of auditors suspecting that operators were misreporting their revenues to avoid payment of licence fee to the government through revenue share.

The official said the move is to check operators' scope to arbitrage which is shifting revenue from higher licence fee to the lower side. The UASL (basic and mobile) telephony has a license fee of 6-10 per cent where as NLD, ILD, ISP and Internet Protocol has 6 per cent.