Employees at the state secretariat are working overtime but that does not mean your application would be cleared any time soon.

An urgency to clear pending detailed contingency (DC) bills has put important plans, files and projects on hold.

At present, employees of different departments of the state government are racing against the June 15 deadline to clear only DC bills.

The accountant-general’s (AG) office in the state has set the June 15 deadline for submission of all pending DC bills.

The officials of different departments, including the entire district administration, are busy putting the DC bills in order and sending them to the AG office for approval. Their day-to-day daily important works are gathering dust for the moment.

Arvind Tiwary, an additional district magistrate (ADM)-rank officer, acting as the nodal officer, said all the departments within the administration were continuously working to meet the deadline. “The amount of the pending DC bills is huge. But work is on in full swing and we are not disturbing any of the departments at the moment as the deadline, announced last month, is very near. Many departments have already submitted the pending bills. The ones left are in the process of submitting them. The salaries of the drawing and disbursing officers (DDOs) have been stopped since last month and unless all DC bills are submitted, the same would not be released,” the officer told The Telegraph.

The DDOs of different departments are authorised to draw sums of money through abstract contingency (AC) bills to meet the expenditure not incorporated in the budget.

The DDOs are required to present DC bills (along with original vouchers) to the accountant-general (accounts & entitlement), Bihar, within six months of withdrawal of all AC bills.

Anirudh Kumar, the additional district magistrate (disaster management), said the daily welfare work was not being done actively. “Many DC bills are pending since 2002-03. Till now, we have submitted DC bills worth Rs 40 crore but are working on bills worth Rs 5 crore more. The deadline ends on June 15 after which the bills would be checked and scrutinised by the AG office till June 30. In case of a mistake, it would be rectified on the spot. Routine work will resume once this work is complete,” the officer said.

When contacted, health department officials reiterated the urgency. “We all are trying to complete the work to meet the deadline. Most of our bills have been submitted though and the remaining would be completed soon. But we are carrying out our day-to-day work too,” Patna civil surgeon Lakhindra Prasad told The Telegraph.

Last year, the comptroller and auditor-general (CAG) had been critical of the state government for failing to submit the DC bills in the proper format.

Of Rs 18,000 crore of pending DC bills from 2002-03 to 2009-10, the state government had submitted bills of around Rs 14,000 crore. Of them, bills worth Rs 11,000 crore were scrutinised and only bills worth Rs 64 crore could be settled.

The CAG office had said that bills worth Rs 10,936 crore could not be settled as they were neither submitted in the proper format nor duly signed by the appropriate authority.