?
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is going to impose a penalty of Rs 15.94 billion on five mobile operators for understating their revenues and paying lesser levies, says news reports.
DoT will be sending demand notice to Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone India, Tata Teleservices, Tata Communications and Reliance Communications (RCOM) by the month-end. DoT is going to issue fresh demand notice to these mobile operators having rejected their earlier responses where mobile operators claimed that they did not misreport their revenues and therefore should not be penalised for the same.
Early this year, the five mobile operators were issued show cause notices by DoT following a DoT appointed panel endorsing the findings of external auditors, which said the mobile operators had understated revenues by Rs 102.68 billion during 2006-07 and 2007-08. The government had appointed external auditors in 2009 to conduct external audits on the books of all leading private mobile operators find out whether mobile operators had correctly reported their revenues or not. Telecom operators are required to pay 6-10 per cent of their annual revenue as licence fee and 2 to 6 per cent as spectrum usage charges. Thus, reporting lower revenues also lowers the share that the mobile operators have to pay to the government.
According to DoT estimates Bharti Airtel and Vodafone India will have to pay penalty of Rs 2.92 billion and 2.54 billion, respectively. Idea Cellular and Tata Telesrvices will have to pay a penalty of Rs 1.13 billion and Rs 2.73 billion, respectively, whereas RCOM will have to pay a penalty of Rs 5.51 billion.
