‘Do your karma, don’t focus on fruits of labour’, CAG tells auditors

At a time when the audit profession is faced with a sort of existential crisis, the Comptroller and Auditor General Rajiv Mehrishi had some sage advice for the ICAI members in practice.

At the CA Institute’s platinum jubilee annual function in the Capital on Monday, he advised the CAs to do their duties and not focus on the fruits of their labour.

“Fear of outcome cannot lead to inaction. Keep doing your work, keep doing it as honestly as you can and do not worry about consequences. Because they (consequences) will be looked after by the greater being,” he said.

The CAG’s remarks are significant as it comes at a time when a spate of corporate blowouts in recent years such as IL&FS, PNB (Nirav Modi) and Vijay Mallya frauds on banking system have put the profession under a cloud. There have also been a slew of auditor resignations from listed companies due to governance and other disclosure concerns.

Mehrishi also admitted that CAs are for some reason paid “notoriously low fees” for their audit work and that creates peculiar difficulty for them (CAs) to deploy resources to the extent required to actually trace the complexity of accounts and sophisticated paper work, increasingly on IT platforms with faint audit trails.

“The picture I am painting is that CAs are very peculiarly placed. They are in ..... to use a nice English word that describes the situation would be ‘Quagmire’. They are now really in a very complex, awkward and hazardous situation,” he said.

CAG also said that he would not like to blame CAs for the high fees charged by them for advisory services, given that such services do require the kind of diligence which justify the fees that is sought. Despite the low fees, expectations remain high from the CA profession in spite of complexity. “Government and the judiciary have high expectations from auditors,” he said.

‘Invest in blockchain’

Mehrishi also underscored the need for India to invest more on ‘blockchain’ technology and do research around it. “It’s not only the CA Institute, but the country itself should be looking at to see how blockchain can help us reduce individual acts of misdemeanour”, he said.

Blockchain should be used to see if open registry of software can lead to more full picture of accounts which are non-repudiable, he added.

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