DoC says it has upgraded Copomis software and has made it accessible and user-friendly to all cooperatives

KATHMANDU, July 4: Cooperatives will now have to report their financial transactions online on a regular basis to the regulator or they will be punished, said the Department of Cooperatives (DoC).

At a time when most of the cooperatives have been dilly-dallying on sending the records of their financial transactions to the DoC, the department has cautioned the cooperatives on the matter. DoC’s Registrar Rudra Prasad Pandit said they have upgraded the software called ‘Copomis’ and made the system user friendly. “In this context, the cooperatives cannot take an excuse to breach the state’s law from now onward,” he said.

In 2017, the government introduced an online financial reporting system named Copomis, and instructed cooperatives to install the software. Although most of the cooperatives have installed the system, according to the DoC, most of them have not been sending their financial reports on a regular basis.

After the cooperatives launched complaints citing the complications in using the software, the DoC in 2019 hired a vendor company to upgrade the system. Pandit said the system has now been developed in such a module that it is similar to filing the tax details to the government authorities.

There are over 30,000 cooperatives operating in the country. But, for the lack of effective monitoring, the sector largely remains unregulated, inviting risk of misappropriation of the general public’s money.

In 2014, a probe commission formed under the chairmanship of Special Court Judge Gauri Bahadur Karki identified 130 cooperatives as troubled, and urged the government to enforce stern laws and regulatory systems to control wayward cooperatives.

Taking membership in multiple cooperatives, failure to involve the members while taking major decisions, and providing large amounts of loans to board members are among the underlying problems of the country’s cooperatives, which are largely blamed on the lack of regular monitoring by the sector’s regulator. As of now, the government has declared over a dozen of the Valley-based cooperatives alone as problematic.

The DoC has maintained a cloud server of Copomis at the Department of Information Technology. The server provides access to the DoC, seven provincial governments and 753 local governments along with all cooperative unions to track the cooperatives spread across the country.

 
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