Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Genie in a bottle

In hindsight, the downright presumptive and astronomical price tag of 1.75 lac crore  put on a yet to be understood  2G saga, seems to have  set in dysfunction  far beyond  proportion, in  every national institution be it the government;- endless executive paralysis ,the judiciary:- straying into policy prerogatives of the executive, the legislative process :  politicising every vital economic issue troubling  our economy ,supervisory watchdogs as the CAG :- already stumbling on an ill defined role and now permitted foray into  vague territories as well.Through its recent  ruling on the revenue audit of private telecom firms, the judiciary would appear to have  acquiesced to an era of Big-Brother Audit,as in this developing economy there is something of the government in any and every productive activity of the nation. Then there is much to be said about auditing itself.Are we equipped with the  immense complexities that modern day  domestic and international business,trade & commerce, intricate channels of financial flow ,varying global accounting norms and so on.Audit  to  stay relevant and contemporary, needs to keep with today's exploding pace of knowledge and technology. The PWD  genre of auditing based on ledger entries is too primitive and would suffer investigative limitations, in this day and age.The 2008 /09 collapse of the US economy was  triggered by doubtful home loan mortgages morphed into tradeable securities and pedigreed auditors / regulators had little clue.. There is  clearly a case for a holistic upgrade of  the science of auditing itself.Opening up new fronts for battle without state of the art  ammunition can only bring  disillusionment to both the auditor and the audited. On both counts, it is  the economy that would suffer.

1 comment:

  1. Agree. There is a need to evolve the audits standard based on the fact that what you are auditing has made a paradigm shift and in many cases with no precedent at all

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