"If the Minister and his colleagues having been outdone on television debates and still desire another public debate, we -- retired senior officers -- are willing for any debate on any platform of their choice. After all, their star performer is also a retired Indian Audit & Accounts Service officer," B S Gill, former deputy Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on behalf of senior retired officials, said in a statement.
The statement comes in response to a call by Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari who sought an open debate on the 2G spectrum report with Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai.
A new twist to the controversy had been added earlier by retired CAG Director General R P Singh who had distanced himself from the report which had said that government suffered a presumptive loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore on account of allocation of 2G spectrum without auction.
The CAG, the statement said, is too high and dignified a Constitutional authority to engage in any unseemly public debate.
"It is for good reasons that the founding fathers of our Constitution have compared his (CAG) position to that of a Supreme Court judge. Even when Ministers preferring to ignore Constitutional decorum, make such unreasonable statements, we would never advise the CAG to be a party to such an extraordinary impropriety," Gill said.
Noting that government finding CAG reports uncomfortable was not a new phenomenon, he said, "never has there been such a strident attack in the media against the institution of the CAG. To prop up a retired officer and have him make disparaging remarks against the professional practices of the department is a new low."