Odishatv Bureau

Sambalpur: A major financial scam has come to limelight at Sambalpur University here after the institution’s financial controller alleged a senior section officer of duping funds worth Rs 48 lakh.

Preliminary police probe revealed that section officer of the University Trinath Hati had allegedly embezzled National Service Scheme (NSS) funds worth Rs 47, 73,912 by transferring it to account of Dillip Biswal, a contractor based at Burla.

It said Trinath redirected the funds in phase wise manner between February 20 and July 27, 2015 through a fake letter from UCO bank addressed to the varsity.

The issue came to notice of the varsity administration after the financial controller Khetrabasi Manseth complained about the fraud.

“The NSS coordinator informed the varsity authorities and me that the funds were unauthorisedly used by the section officer Trinath Hati following which we had reported the matter to the Accountant General to carry out a special audit on the issue,” said Manseth.

On the other hand the matter has been seriously taken up by Burla police and is being probed by a special audit team from Bhubaneswar.

“After scanning through the letters we found that the University despatch register and the despatch number on the letter did not match so we are sure that the letter was fake and the official has intentionally used it to dupe the money,” Burla IIC Manas Ranjan Pradhan said.

As per the NSS, any kind of funds transfer can be made only on the name of coordinator but even though the scam occurred in 2015 the varsity authorities could only come to know about it recently.

Speaking to OTV, varsity Vice Chancellor Chittaranjan Tripathy said “We have formed an internal enquiry committee comprising two syndicate members, registrar, deputy secretary in charge of the NSS bureau, district audit officer appointed by the collector who will thoroughly scrutinise the matter and action will be taken accordingly.”

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