The Supreme Court on Monday expressed anguish at the large number of fraudulent claims being filed for Covid death compensation and said it might order a statutory auditing to weed out the bogus applications.

“We never expected or visualised that this (provision of compensation) can be misused…. It (grant of compensation) is a very pious work and we thought our morality had not gone so (far) down that in this also there will be some false claims,” the bench of Justice M.R. Shah and V. Nagarathna observed orally. “If some officers are involved, that is also very serious….”

Justice Shah, who headed the bench, told solicitor-general Tushar Mehta, who was appearing for the Centre: “We can entrust the inquiry to the office of the accountant-general….”

The court noted that at the last hearing it had asked the Centre to move an application on fixing an upper time limit for the filing of Covid death compensation claims, but this had not been done.

Mehta offered to file the application by Tuesday. The bench fixed the next hearing on Monday, March 21.

At the previous hearing on March 7, the bench had indicated it might order an independent probe into the issue of fake Covid death certificates by doctors, which families were using to file bogus compensation claims.

The bench, hearing a public interest plea, had earlier directed the states to pay a Covid death compensation of Rs 50,000 over and above any other compensation the bereaved families might be entitled to under insurance laws and other statutory provisions.

At one of the hearings, the court had directed the authorities not to insist on RT-PCR reports but release the compensation seeing death certificates.