Bhubaneswar: The SAI20 Summit under India’s G20 Presidency began today in Goa. Girish Chandra Murmu, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India, as the Chair of the Supreme Audit Institutions-20 (SAI20) Engagement Group, led the deliberations.
In his opening address, CAG highlighted that the Supreme Audit Institutions have a crucial role to play in the audit of Blue Economy and Responsible AI to ensure good governance, transparency and accountability and to optimise their positive impact on humankind.
CAG further stated that though the audit of Blue Economy and Responsible AI is challenging, their all-pervasive, cross-cutting nature compounded with evolving technology and usage, necessitate close cooperation among the SAIs for knowledge sharing and capacity building.
While explaining the criticality of the priority area of Blue Economy, CAG stated that as the Blue Economy gains primacy, so will its audit. CAG urged that in order to keep ahead of the curve, the SAI20 community must prioritize collaborations in arriving at new techniques, skills, capabilities and methods and that SAIs must proactively formalize channels and platforms that would facilitate these collaborations.
While discussing the possibility and perils of AI, CAG emphasized that it was essential that policy makers put in place processes to responsibly harness the potential of this technology. CAG emphasized that as AI was making greater inroads into governance, SAIs must inevitably prepare themselves for auditing AI based governance systems and SAIs must look for opportunities to adopt AI into their audit techniques to increase their effectiveness.
CAG while announcing the establishment of a Center of Excellence in the Blue Economy at SAI India’s International Centre for Environment Audit and Sustainable Development (iCED), a recognised Global Training Facility for INTOSAI, said that the ball was set rolling in April 2023 with an international webinar on experience sharing by 7 SAIs represented by 32 participants on audit of blue economy related issues.
CAG further emphasized that the vision was to create a Centre of excellence that not only fosters research but also acts as a catalyst for knowledge sharing and capacity building amongst SAIs in this important field