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The CA Institute has roped in Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to develop and run its prestigious UDIN project, a top official said.
As part of its digital journey, the CA Institute has also decided to adopt the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model in a big way for most of its activities around its members and students and has brought in TCS as the SaaS provider, Naveen Gupta, President, Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), told BusinessLine here.
TCS will also automate and maintain the life cycle of CA members and students, implying that engagement of nearly 3 lakh members and 8 lakh students with the accounting body will now be largely online on a digital platform maintained by TCS.
To enable TCS do the data migration and data audit before the UDIN platform becomes mandatory, the Central Council of the CA Institute has now decided to defer the date of UDIN becoming mandatory to February 1 next year as against the earlier announced date of January 1, Gupta said.
Gupta, however, declined to go into the commercial aspects of the TCS contract, which is expected to run into crores.
It may be recalled that UDIN (Unique Document Identification Number) was conceptualised to tackle the menace of forged certifications of financial statements and documents.
TCS estimates about 55 lakh UDINs will get generated and maintained in India
Regulators and banks can use the portal to check the authenticity of the documents. TCS will set up a 24x7 help desk either at Noida/Mumbai/Kanpur with toll-free numbers and 5-7 tele-callers so that no difficulty is faced by any regulator and member regarding UDIN.
Examination reforms
As part of slew of reforms on the examinations front, the CA Institute has decided to introduce the concept of “re-evaluation” of answer books.
“We have now initiated talks with the UGC, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and the Ministry of HRD to help us provide the best practices adopted by universities on this front,” Gupta said. Also, from November this year, digital marking has been introduced in five papers at the intermediate level. This will be expanded to more papers in the next exam. All existing examiners will be required to undergo an online refresher crash course and pass the online test in their respective subjects once every three years.
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