With end-to-end digital audits on government accounts underway from this fiscal, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), Girish Chandra Murmu, has said that the government auditor will this year look to better its record and issue more reports than last year while also expanding the audit scope to newer areas, especially in the blue economy.

“We surpassed the ten year record last year, and this year also it will further increase as in a digital setting, processing of reports will be faster. Correction will be faster. Whatever we were doing manually, this will cut down the time”, Murmu said post the conclusion of SAI20 Summit at Goa. 

He was responding to a query on whether CAG now taking a digital path would lead to an increase in the number of reports from government auditor. 

E-commerce companies 

Asked whether SAI20 member nations (Supreme Audit Institutions) have thought of regulating the use of AI by e-commerce companies, Murmu said, “We are not in that kind of auditing, we are into public sector auditing. We don’t do private sector unless it involves PPP or joint venture. We don’t know in due course what will happen, but right now we don’t have scope of doing that kind of job”.

Murmu highlighted that income tax department is now bringing more of e-commerce activity into the tax net. 

“Once they bring, it will be our purview also to see and what kind of assessments.  Independently we are not doing it. We will automatically do it”, Murmu added.

Standardised Format

Murmu also said that CAG is now engaged in stakeholders’ meetings with government to see if standard format of data capture can be done for every scheme across India. 

(This correspondent was at Panaji at invitation of CAG India for SAI20 summit)

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