Nu 8 billion hiding in one project

The Royal Audit Authority’s Annual Audit Report 2024–25 reports total construction-procurement irregularities of Nu 9,987 million — more than twice the Nu 4,002 million reported for FY 2021–22. The increase is concentrated in one mega-project: Punatsangchhu-II Hydropower Authority, where reported irregularities reach Nu 7,790 million, or 78 percent of the total.

The pattern is structural rather than personal. The country’s most visible mega-projects absorb disproportionate institutional attention; the second-order audit-and-compliance apparatus has not yet been built at the scale required to monitor multi-decade construction windows.

The Crown’s articulating function continues to operate on a forty-year horizon. The compliance apparatus that should monitor that horizon operates, today, on an annual one. The gap shows up in the audit report.

Underneath the audit trail sits a measurement divergence the country has not yet reconciled. The Anti-Corruption Commission’s National Integrity Assessment scored 7.97 in 2019 and 8.01 in 2022 — both presented as “Good”, both essentially unchanged. Over the same window, audit-flagged irregularities multiplied roughly 25× — though, as the chart above shows, the bulk of that jump is the single Punatsangchhu-II item; strip it out and the underlying trail grew closer to 5×. The survey-based integrity score and the audited financial trail tell opposite stories. Which one is closer to reality is the open question.