By Satya Prakash Nayak | The Blink
BHUBANESWAR: Seventy-seven bank accounts. Forty-eight account holders. More than ₹9.24 crore in government money. And transactions allegedly spread across four financial years.
These numbers form the core of an Odisha Vigilance investigation into suspected embezzlement from the office of the Superintending Engineer, Roads & Buildings Division-I, Bhubaneswar.
Six people have so far been arrested.
But the arrests may answer only the first question in the case: Who allegedly participated in taking or routing the money?
They do not answer the more consequential question: How could allegedly fraudulent bills repeatedly pass through Odisha’s digitised financial-control system for years?
What Vigilance alleges
According to Odisha Vigilance, Section Officer Banalata Mohanty and Junior Assistant Bibhudutta Nayak, both attached to the Establishment Section of R&B Division-I, allegedly conspired with others to generate fraudulent sanction orders and bills between financial years 2022-23 and 2025-26.
The disputed claims allegedly included provisional gratuity and unutilised leave salary in the names of retired government employees as well as office contingency expenditure.
The crucial allegation concerns the destination of the payments.
Investigators allege that genuine beneficiary bank details were replaced in fraudulent bills with account numbers belonging to relatives, acquaintances and associates.
The money was then processed through Odisha’s Integrated Financial Management System, or IFMS.
According to Vigilance, 77 bank accounts belonging to 48 people were used in the alleged diversion. The distinction is critical.
There is currently no publicly established evidence that an outsider hacked Odisha’s IFMS servers or technically breached the platform.
The allegation emerging from the Vigilance investigation is different.
Fraudulent sanction orders and bills were allegedly created, beneficiary details were allegedly substituted, and those claims were then processed through the authorised government financial system.
If that account is correct, the question is not simply whether Odisha’s computer system was secure.
It is whether the human and institutional controls surrounding the computer system worked at all.
The State’s paperless Treasury framework requires supporting sanction orders and prescribed documents to accompany claims electronically. Treasury officers continue to have a scrutiny role.
Government instructions have also required digital signatures or e-signatures at different stages of the IFMS process.
And Odisha’s electronic-payment rules place responsibility on Drawing and Disbursing Officers for the correctness of beneficiary banking information submitted for payment.
That makes the alleged ₹9.24-crore diversion a trail that should be reconstructable.
For every disputed payment, investigators should be able to answer:
Who created the sanction order?
Who prepared the bill?
Which IFMS user ID handled it?
Whose digital signature authenticated it?
Who entered or altered the beneficiary bank account?
Which DDO submitted the claim?
Which Treasury processed it?
Who authorised the final payment?
And ultimately:
Who received the money?
Four financial years — and no one noticed?
These are questions for the Odisha Finance Department and Directorate of Treasuries and Inspection, not merely for the Vigilance investigators.
Who verified the beneficiary?
They determine whether the alleged fraud exploited a software-control weakness, weak administrative verification, compromised credentials, collusion between officials — or some combination of these factors.
At present, the publicly available evidence is insufficient to choose among those explanations.
Where was the Treasury?
Digital governance does not abolish Treasury accountability.
Investigation should publish, when legally possible, a money-trail statement showing:
With 77 accounts allegedly involved, following the money may reveal far more about the architecture of the operation than the arrest count.
The biggest question: is this confined to one R&B office?
This is where the case potentially becomes much larger.
If beneficiary-account substitution could allegedly operate for years in one R&B division, Odisha should determine whether similar patterns exist elsewhere.
Ten questions the Odisha government needs to answer
1. Who approved each of the disputed sanction orders behind the alleged ₹9.24-crore diversion?
2. Which IFMS user IDs and digital signatures were used to submit and authenticate the disputed bills?
3. Who served as DDO during the relevant transactions, and what verification did each perform?
4. Who entered or authorised changes to beneficiary bank accounts?
5. Did Treasury officials object to any of the disputed bills? If so, what happened subsequently?
6. Did IFMS generate alerts about repeated beneficiary changes, unusual recipient accounts or payment patterns?
7. What did internal audit, Treasury inspection and Accountant General audit report during the four financial years?
8. Of the alleged ₹9.24 crore, precisely how much has been recovered, frozen, traced or remains outstanding?
9. Who first discovered the irregularity, when, and what transaction or document triggered the inquiry?
10. Will Odisha order a statewide forensic scan of IFMS transactions to determine whether beneficiary-account substitution occurred elsewhere?
A digital system is only as strong as its controls
The alleged R&B fraud is ultimately about more than ₹9.24 crore.
Governments across India have invested heavily in digitising public finance partly because technology promises traceability, speed and reduced opportunities for manipulation.
But digitisation does not make corruption impossible.
Because after four financial years and ₹9.24 crore in alleged diversion, the most important question is no longer simply:
Who took the money?
It is:Who was supposed to stop it — and why didn’t they?
