Panjim: In a move aimed at revamping accounting and auditing services in alignment with the technological upgradation, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India Girish Chandra Murmu has on Tuesday said that his office has proposed the government to bring changes in the recruitment rules for auditors to make IT proficiency as an eligibility criteria to make officers ready for the future.
While talking to Millennium Post after the conclusion of the SAI20 Summit meeting under the Indian Presidency of G20 in Goa, CAG Murmu also said the national auditor was in process of making constant upgrades in its IT infrastructure with the help of technology experts.
“We have proposed to the government for the changes in recruitment rules for the selection process of Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&AS) officials. The others who have been in the service would be trained to make them IT proficient, while the new officers would have to get into the service after passing the IT proficiency tests,” the CAG said.
“So I’m taking up with the DoPT and the UPSC to approve this proposal. I cannot make it compulsory for the existing staff right now. But the future-ready capacity will be there,” Murmu said, adding that the trend of recruitments through UPSC is witnessing a change as more number of officers from either engineering background or medical fields are getting selected for the premier services. Murmu further said that the CAG has started end-to-end digital audits from this year onwards and the move is proving helpful in improving the accuracy of audits.
Indian Audit and Accounts Service (IA&IS) is a Central group ‘A’ central civil service under the CAG. The central civil servants under the IA&AS serve in an audit managerial capacity, in the audit and accounts departments of the government. In response to another question, Murmu said, “The CAG is already using “some kind of machine learning” because the auditor handles a lot of data. Our AIs (artificial intelligence) are very secure, and we can vouch for data integrity.”
“We are not technologically so advanced. We don’t know how we can audit the AI system. But whatever the government has adopted, we are auditing directly, like the GSTN,” he added.