NEW DELHI, SEPT 20: President APJ Abdul Kalam on Tuesday urged auditors to suggest real-time and online corrections to various state-run schemes instead of auditing them after the completion of the project.

Inaugurating the All India Conference of Accountants General, Dr Kalam recalled his experience of the Agni missile programme and said: “If corrective action is not taken in real time, the missile will travel far from the target, leading to its failure. Similarly, if auditors audit after the event is over or the mission is completed, they will see many deviations and it would be too late to correct mistakes.”

Unveiling a seven-point agenda to make auditing effective, Dr Kalam said “The aim of audit should be to detect deviation in near real time when the project is in progress and provide constructive solutions so that the objective of the project is achieved.”

The President also asked the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to become a partner in the country’s agriculture mission to double foodgrain production to 400 million tonne by 2020.

Stressing on the need to adopt e-governance in the country, Dr Kalam said such a system was being developed at Rashtrapati Bhavan with the active cooperation of the finance and audit departments.

“E-governance provides an avenue for making government transactions, be it government-to-government (G2G) or government-to-citizen (G2C), completely transparent,” he said.

In an IT-enabled environment, a near paperless accounting system, which hinges on electronic cash and credit card transactions, including authenticated and secure digital signature, will have to become part and parcel of business of CAG, he said.

The paper trail was still being maintained for fear of mistrust and untested authentication mechanism, Dr Kalam said, adding: “This has to be changed in such a way that transactions are born digital and automatically captured; we should spend more time on thinking rather than on data entry.”

Welcoming the President, Comptroller and Auditor General VN Kaul said that the Government Accounting Standards Advisory Board (Gasab) was preparing a roadmap for transition from the current cash-based system to an accrual- based system of accounting in line with the recommendations of the 12th Finance Commission.

The transition to the accrual-based system of accounting, he said, would help in producing better quality financial information on the activities of the union and state governments.

The new system, he added, would also improve transparency and usability of government accounts for financial and fiscal management.