The department of telecommunications is likely to send notice to telecom operators, including Reliance Communications, Bharti airtel, Idea Cellular and Tata Teleservices for demand of about Rs 1,100 crore for under reporting revenues.
A senior official from the department of telecommunications (DoT) said it has completed investigations into the audit report of telecom companies and the demand may be raised by the month end. The financial liability for RCom is around Rs 330 crore, while for Vodafone Essar is about Rs 200 crore.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), in 2009, had asked the DoT to conduct a special audit of the financial accounts of five telecom companies — RCom, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone-Essar, Idea Cellular and Tata Teleservices — for the 2007-08 period.
DoT had ordered special audit after the recommendation of Trai, which felt that operators were misreporting their revenues to avoid payment of licence fee to the government through revenue share. The unified access service license (UASL) telephony has a licence fee of 6-10 per cent whereas NLD, ILD and ISP has six per cent.
Trai had noticed that some of operators were showing more revenue in segment that carried lower licence fee.