DailyPost 2714
ROBUST PUBLIC AUDIT MECHANISM
The country has a very robust public audit mechanism is what we are made to believe and that is what we feel by our grooming. The basic principles of public audit remain unknown to the most of us, including the best educated and also the practitioners in that field. Even the quantum and periodicity of public audit including the agencies involved in this exercise, internal and external, remain shroud in secrecy, if not hidden. All we see is some audit report here and there and a media tamasha for a few days and then it’s all over. Why different audits done on the same organization, dealing with same issues, and the same period conclude with different audit remarks.
What is liability of the auditor? What is total percentage of transactions, procurements, financial accounts which needs to be audited by external auditors? Why procurements don’t have an intensive pre-audit? How are long delays in projects accounted for? Where have reached in the preventive audit? What happens to the extremely critical audit paras? Has any audit of it been done over the years? Are internal audits effective? So, on one the side we have a very robust public audit mechanism and on the other, we have skeletons falling in hordes, as and when auditors delve a little deeper than the financial skin.
How does price discovery happen? No one knows, there are no standardised systems validation or sourcing mechanisms. An AI enabled super audit of any organisation for last 25 years, may just authenticate our worst fears. The crux of the matter is that public audit has been a private affair from the point of cocooned audit processes. Audit to scam is what we know of. Its time we really create a process of public audit, where public is truly involved and given the nature of technology available today, it is certainly doable. A public digital audit platform with prices being sourced from a various validated sources and processed and authenticated by renowned market experts can be small beginning.
This would become our reference point. All that needs to come on to the platform needs to decided, so also most empirical way of price discovery inclusive of services which are bundled together. Projects and schemes need to be handled in a different manner and the technology would provide enough and many ways to tackle the issues at hand. It would be an yeomen service if the whole world of auditors and the knowledgeable civil society would have done a yeomen service if they create and make it functional. Undeniably, technology has to be all the world. All public domain connected data can be sourced and audit insights derived at. That itself would be a commendable achievement. Some faintly similar would be the nature of fact check which is being done in the digital world. Lots of organizations have gained immense expertise in this area. Open-source intelligence in another area where totally out of the box work is being done. These can be some of the models which can be looked into to create a public audit platform and process. Financial control or at least information of the type required can be the beginning of financial democracy.
IT’s TIME PUBLIC AUDIT GOES REALLY PUBLIC, ENABLED BY TECHNOLOGY.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.