The Recent reports of lurking corruption in public works initiated under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) have led many observers to advocate the payment of wages through bank accounts, instead of cash payments. The main advantage of this approach is that it reduces the likelihood of any fudging of the muster rolls on the part of the implementing agencies (e.g. the gram panchayats), since the actual wage payments are beyond their reach it can be seen as an example of "the

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... ration of payment agencies from implementing agencies", adopted by several states (in various forms) as a safeguard against payments of NREGA wages have already been introduced in a number of districts and are likely to be used more widely in the near future. Against this background, this paper presents a few observations on this arrangement, based on a field visit to Mayurbhanj district (Orissa). The investigation was carried out in October 2007, on the sidelines of a larger survey of NREGA in Orissa, A small team visited three blocks of Mayubhanj district (Joshipur, Betnoti and Suliapada). It covered four randomly selected gram panchayats (GPS) within each block and one worksite in each GP. One worksite in each block was selected for detailed muster-roll verification and a questionnaire was filled at each worksite