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Ending a 4-year-long operation, CAG to go paperless from April 1

The next step ahead for the national auditor will be in the field of AI

CAG CAG of India Girish Chandra Murmu | Facebook

A more than four-year-long nationwide operation in the office of the Comptroller and General (CAG) of India and its about 150 field offices across the country to go paperless will come to an end on Saturday.

All those bulky files of audit and accounting literature including detailed communications with the auditees will be reduced to the bin of history when from the new financial year on April 1, digitalization and paperless work will be the new mantra.

Officially launching the full digitisation of the audit process through the OIOS application on Friday, the CAG Girish Chandra Murmu said: “From tomorrow onwards, all new audit work in our institution will take place only through OIOS and physical paper-based workflow must cease.”

An enterprise wide end-to-end IT application, OIOS refers to One IAAD One System. It is a web-enabled solution with support for multiple languages with offline functionality and a mobile app.

A CAG source told THE WEEK: “The audit design including audit objectives to an actual audit, past reports, all documentation work will no longer have physical copies. Whatever comes in physical form will be scanned and stored. This will greatly enhance audit quality and accuracy besides leading to easy information sharing among all relevant auditors.”

The other obvious and important aspect is substantial saving of time, effort and money.

“Be it digitising the accounting and entitlement process, adopting IT-enabled audit, using data analytics in facilitating audit, workflow automations. OIOS is a step in that direction which strengthens our audit officers to continue to provide independent and credible assurance on public resources and be a global leader in public sector auditing,” Murmu added.

The next step ahead for the national auditor as far as technology infused is concerned will be in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

“Extensive use of AI in all fields is an inevitable outcome of government policies. IAAD is working towards building infrastructure and processes for AI and Machine Learning and harnessing the potential of these technologies for delivering audit products more effectively,” the CAG said.

At the same time, Murmu cautioned on the use of AI saying the “role of auditors is going to be critical in such a context since AI is still a little understood technology, mostly opaque in its operations and needs to be evaluated in terms of ethics and responsibility.”



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