Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

CAG for concurrent audit

—Photo: S. Gopakumar

Making a point: Comptroller and Auditor-General of India Vinod Rai delivers the annual M.N.V. Nair Memorial Lecture in Thiruvananthapuram on Tuesday.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India Vinod Rai has stressed the need for a new system of public audit, where auditing would take place concurrent with public spending.

Delivering the annual M.N.V. Nair Memorial Lecture instituted by the Public Affairs Forum and the Asian School of Management here on Tuesday, he said auditing now was more of a post-mortem exercise. Concurrent auditing would help minimise leakage, facilitate correction and optimise results.

The country had achieved nine per cent growth during the past three years and, even with the slowdown now, the growth this year was expected to be 8.8 per cent. Such a high rate of growth also meant that an enormous amount of public spending was taking place in the country. This called for greater transparency and accountability on the part of the executive, he said.

The Plan size this year was about Rs.2 lakh crore and 25 per cent of this spending on development would take place through Panchayati Raj institutions, which had little expertise in handling big money accounts.

He said Kerala had a good local fund audit system, but the case was not the same with many other States. A lot of capacity building would have to be done at that level, the CAG said.

Mr. Vinod Rai said there would be great pressure on infrastructure development in the coming years. Quoting a recent study, he said some 70 crore people — equivalent to the present population of entire Europe — would migrate from the villages to the cities and towns in India by 2030. This migration would demand huge investment on new urban infrastructure.

Hardly 25 per cent of the public spending accounts usually came under the CAG’s scanner and this included the large spending accounts and the accounts that would come into focus due to special reasons (such as corruption charges). Internal audit would, therefore, require strengthening at all levels, he said.

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