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Most co-ops not linked to online info system
More than 98 percent of the cooperatives have not established an online information system despite government instructions to do so. The government’s plan to have all cooperatives electronically connected to allow effective monitoring hit a snag as local units have not adopted computerised accounting and financial management systems.bookmark
Published at : November 19, 2018
Updated at : November 19, 2018 10:01
Kathmandu
More than 98 percent of the cooperatives have not established an online information system despite government instructions to do so. The government’s plan to have all cooperatives electronically connected to allow effective monitoring hit a snag as local units have not adopted computerised accounting and financial management systems.
A year ago, the government launched the Copomis software in a bid to bring all cooperatives in the country into a single system. The government connected 33,000 out of the 34,512 cooperatives in the country with the system, but only 447 have been using it, according to the Department of Cooperatives.
The platform works in compliance with the Pearls monitoring system, a financial performance monitoring system, which includes a set of financial ratios. It involves 44 quantitative financial indicators that facilitate an integral analysis of the financial condition of the institutions.
It records information such as the number of members of each cooperative, share capital, investments made by the cooperatives, deposit to credit ratio and liquidity ratio, among others.
The system is expected to provide information on duplication of cooperative members, portion of bad loans, borrowers and liquidity situation which will help to prevent embezzlement at cooperatives, according to the department. Under this system, all cooperatives have to submit their financial reports to the concerned authorities online.
Gopi Nath Mainali, secretary of the Ministry of Land Management and Cooperatives and Poverty Alleviation, said the objective of the system was to effectively monitor the cooperatives, but the government had not been able to bring them into the system.
Narayan Prasad Aryal, deputy registrar at the department, said poor computer-based systems at the local governments and cooperatives had hindered effective implementation of the Copomis system. He added that lack of trained manpower at the local level had also created problems. According to Aryal, the department provided the software and issued usernames and passwords to most of the 753 local governments to implement the system, except those in rural areas that are not equipped with adequate computers.
The regulatory body has not been able to implement the system even in financial cooperatives that have annual turnovers of more than Rs50 million. As per the department’s statistics, there are more than 1,000 cooperatives in this segment. “Only half of them are following the online information system and reporting to the authority on time,” Aryal said.
A number of cooperatives, including Oriental Cooperative, landed in trouble after failing to comply with good governance practices. The Problematic Cooperatives Wealth Management Committee, formed to assess troubled cooperatives, revealed that Oriental alone embezzled Rs8 billion.
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