From OIOS to CAG-Connect: Promise and the Accountability Gap
CAG Office India (Image official website)
Without clear timelines, resources, and an annual “tech-to-impact” roadmap in the CAG’s Performance Report, India’s audit reforms risk being remembered as untested experiments rather than accountability breakthroughs.
By P SESH KUMAR
NEW DELHI, September 18, 2025 — The Comptroller and Auditor General of India has doubled down on technology. After the fanfare around the “One IAAD One System” (OIOS) rollout, the September 2025 presser in Delhi announced yet another ambitious step: the launch of CAG-Connect, a unified portal promising to bring nearly a million auditee entities onto a single digital interface by November.
This, it is claimed, will make audit workflows more transparent, data-driven and accessible across geographies, while also scaling up remote and hybrid audits. On paper, the vision is impressive. In practice, its effectiveness will depend not on the launch of platforms but on whether these platforms deliver measurable outcomes—faster audits, sharper risk targeting, higher uptake of recommendations, and demonstrable gains in governance.
Without a roadmap for deliverables, value addition and cost–benefit analysis, the risk is that each new initiative looks transformative but remains cosmetic, failing to push CAG into the space that really matters: all-India, high-risk performance audits that bite into the heart of governance failures.
The promise of CAG-Connect
CAG-Connect is presented as the next leap: an auditee portal that allows entities to directly respond to queries and inspection reports through a unified interface. The CAG has promised that this will create transparency, allow real-time tracking of audit observations by both sides, and make geographical remoteness irrelevant.
Remote audits, hitherto used cautiously, are to be expanded by leveraging technology so that audit teams no longer need to sit in the auditee’s office. Hybrid audits, where field visits are restricted to substantive checks and the rest done digitally, are pitched as the new normal.
The message is clear: India’s audit system wants to catch up with the global wave of digital oversight.
OIOS and the continuity question
This announcement follows on the heels of OIOS, launched in 2023 as the end-to-end digital backbone of IAAD. OIOS was supposed to be the single source of truth, covering master data, audit design and execution, quality control, report generation and follow-up. The 2023–24 Annual Performance Report duly recorded that OIOS had been operationalised across more than a hundred offices and that training modules were rolled out.
The Hyderabad meetings earlier in 2025 had added the AI/ML certification track, a proposed large language model trained on audit reports, and cyber-security audits in the INTOSAI agenda. In that sense, CAG-Connect is less a standalone revolution than an add-on, an auditee-facing layer that plugs into the OIOS spine. But the continuity raises a question: has OIOS itself delivered? Has it shortened audit cycles, increased the share of high-risk performance audits, or improved recommendation-implementation rates?
There is little evidence in the public domain. The new portal may improve front-end transparency, but without evidence of back-end impact, the announcement risks looking like another milestone in a series of system launches.
Scaling, onboarding and state audits
Nearly a million auditee entities is an eye-catching figure. But coverage and capability are not the same. Will district level establishments, small panchayats and state-level bodies with weak connectivity, patchy staffing and low digital literacy use CAG-Connect with the same fluency as central ministries? Will state audit offices, historically resource-constrained, be able to handle the influx of digital responses in real time?
The earlier OIOS roll-out showed wide variance in maturity between offices, with some offices fully digitized and others still juggling paper workflows. If those transitional challenges remain, adding another portal risks creating an additional layer of complexity rather than simplification.
Unless the state-level onboarding plan is spelled out with timelines, help-desk capacity, and measurable maturity goals, the auditee interface could become unevenly used, eroding the promise of uniform transparency.
There is no serious evaluation of the costs and efficiencies of OIOS till date in public domain. Anonymity or lack of attention on and concern about CAG among the stakeholders cannot remain a shield for long.
Remote and hybrid audits: efficiency versus credibility
The presser highlighted the expansion of remote and hybrid audits as a key gain. Removing the need for physical presence certainly cuts costs, saves time, and allows wider coverage. Yet, the credibility of audits has always rested on field verification, face-to-face scrutiny of records, and unfiltered conversations with stakeholders. Restricting physical visits to “substantive checks only” risks narrowing the audit lens, particularly in welfare schemes, infrastructure projects and environmental programmes where the devil lies in physical execution.
Without clear protocols on when remote methods suffice and when fieldwork is indispensable, there is a danger of efficiency trumping effectiveness, and audits becoming box-ticking exercises that governments can shrug off.
The silence on high-risk performance audits
What is striking is what the presser did not say. There was no word on whether these technological upgrades would be deployed to mount all-India performance audits of welfare schemes, public health, sanitation, climate resilience or the GST system—sectors where leakage, inefficiency and capture are most damaging to citizens. Nor was there any assurance that technology would enable cross-jurisdictional audits of mega projects such as national highways, irrigation schemes or energy transitions.
Without explicit commitment to tackle these high-risk areas, technology appears to be modernising the scaffolding while leaving the core untouched.
The missing road map
The Hyderabad meetings earlier in 2025 had already pushed India onto the global stage with bold claims about AI, cybersecurity audits and even a home-grown LLM. The Delhi presser extends that narrative with CAG-Connect. But the Achilles’ heel of all these announcements is the absence of a road map.
There is no clarity on timelines for tangible deliverables, no metrics for cost–benefit, no disclosure of what additional human resources will be needed or how capacity will be built in weaker states, and no targets for reduction in audit cycle time or increase in recommendation implementation.
Without such a framework, the initiatives remain open-ended aspirations rather than enforceable commitments.
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What Lies Ahead
It is a positive sign that CAG is attempting to come out of its otherwise sterilised environment and coccooned existence through limited interactions with media. An overhaul of India’s audit system is long overdue and welcome. OIOS, CAG-Connect, AI certification tracks, and cyber-security audits all demonstrate that the institution is alive to global trends. But technology is not an end in itself. Unless these platforms are tied to specific, measurable outcomes—more high-risk performance audits completed on time, higher rates of corrective action by governments, demonstrable fiscal savings, and better service delivery—their impact will be marginal.
Transitional challenges, from training auditors to onboarding a million auditees, must be acknowledged honestly with clear timelines and resource allocations. What is urgently needed is a published “tech-to-impact” map, updated annually in the CAG’s Performance Report, that shows how each initiative translates into accountability dividends.
Until then, each presser risks being remembered less for transforming audit and more for adding another gleaming layer to the edifice of untested reforms. Hopefully its overdue annual performance report of 2024-25 will have perceptible and laudable reporting of real outcomes and value addition generated through its technological experiments.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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