Rajya Sabha votes over 200 times before passing CA Bill, exemplifies procedural rigour

The Bill seeks to provide a mechanism for dealing with the cases of misconduct in the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), the Institute of Cost Accountants of India and the Institute of Company Secretaries of India.

The Bill was passed by Lok Sabha on March 30.

The debate on the Bill including the reply of the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman took about 2 hours 20 minutes. The process of voting on the 106 clauses and clause-wise amendments took over 30 minutes, accounting for about 18 per cent of the total time taken for passing the Bill.

The Bill seeks to amend the existing Chartered Accountants Act (ICAI), 1949, the Cost and Works Accountants Act, 1959 and the Company Secretaries Act 1980.

Procedurally, each clause, if amendments are moved, is required to be put to vote for two times based on the number of Members moving amendments to each clause.

John Brittas gave 163 notices for amendments to various clauses of the Bill and moved almost all of them during the clause-wise consideration of the Bill. Binoy Viswam also moved a few other amendments.

Since all the amendments are required to be put to the vote of the House, a voice vote was taken over 200 times before the Bill was passed.

The vocal cords of Deputy Chairman Harivansh were put to severe test reading out the clauses, number of amendments moved to each clause with the names of the Members moving the amendments and putting the clauses and amendments to the vote of the House.

According to Secretariat officials, it was after a long time that a Bill with so many clauses and so many amendments was passed with voting taking substantial time.

The Chartered Accountants, the Cost and Works Accountants and the Company Secretaries (Amendment) Bill 2021 is also aimed at enhancing "accountability and transparency" by providing for audit of accounts of the institutes by a firm of chartered accountants to be appointed annually by the Council from the panel of auditors maintained by the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India. (ANI)