Shimla, May 12
The comptroller and auditor-general (CAG) has mooted a proposal to tie up with certain defence training institutes to enable its personnel to get a better perspective of the military system of functioning. This would help auditors in fine tuning their audit mechanism.
Stating this in his keynote address at the annual command officers’ conference organised by the CAG’s Defence Services Wing, additional deputy CAG Samar Ray listed institutes like the College of Defence Management and the College of Materials Management as potential training grounds for auditors.
He also laid emphasis on the audit of critical issues and high-risk areas like capital acquisitions, contract audit, procurement audit and proper training in domain knowledge for selecting performance audits.
A holistic system of audit of controls in an organisation, including internal audit and techniques like statistical sampling to quantify risk, scrutiny of Army works, land management of defence estates as well as research and development projects were the other areas of focus, he said.
In his address, the director-general of audit, defence services, said the defence audit set-up was established in alignment with various Army Commands, with controllers of defence accounts responsible for their respective regions. He added the objective of defence audit was to bring to focus the deficiencies in the system in the context of the huge budget of the Army, which was almost comparable to the budget of many states.
The aim of the conference is to take stock of last year’s achievement and plan for the future and make audit more valuable by getting inputs from stakeholders, especially the Army. The four-day conference will also focus on identifying issues for audit during the ensuing year, besides various administrative and training matters.
Developing risk-based audit guidelines for various areas of audit and incorporating these in the defence audit manual, strengthening the use of information technology in defence audit and concerns pertaining to audit of cantonment boards are other issues on the agenda. Command officers of the defence audit would also be making presentations on their audit plans for the coming year.
