How Global Auditors Advise Govts Without Selling Their Souls
PM Narendra Modi walking into new parliament
UK, US, Canada, and New Zealand show how supreme auditors can guide governments in real time — without compromising independence. India’s CAG can too, if it abandons its fear of proximity.
By P SESH KUMAR
New Delhi, November 24, 2025 — Across Westminster and Washington, Ottawa and Wellington, supreme audit institutions (SAI) have quietly evolved from distant bookkeepers into sharp-eyed advisers, sitting closer to the cockpit of decision-making without touching the controls.
The UK’s NAO, the US GAO, Canada’s OAG, and New Zealand’s Auditor-General all answer advisory and even quasi-concurrent questions from governments and parliaments, yet none of them have morphed into “co-decision makers.”
They do it by playing to one golden rule: they illuminate risk and options but never sign the cheque. Their tools range from real-time briefings and procurement reviews to inquiries, guidance notes, and even bid-protest adjudication.
All of this is wrapped in a constitutional and professional firewall that preserves the auditor’s right to turn around later and say, “We warned you-and we’re still free to criticize what you did.”
The Indian CAG, if willing to shed its fear of proximity, can adopt a similar model without tearing up the Constitution-starting with Parliament-facing real-time analytics and published guidance, and cautiously extending into structured advisory channels that are transparently non-binding.
If one walks through the world of public audit today, one will not find lonely auditors hunched over ledgers three years after the event. We would find institutions that are increasingly in the room while the drama is unfolding-eyes open, pen ready, but hands firmly off the steering wheel.
The UK National Audit Office (NAO) spells it out almost shamelessly: it does not just certify accounts; it “helps improve public services” and actively “shares insight and guidance” and good practice across government, drawing on lessons from its value-for-money work and correspondence with MPs. That is advisory language, not museum-auditor language.
In London, the choreography is simple but clever. The NAO’s formal client is Parliament, particularly the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), but the insights travel far beyond Westminster committee rooms.
The NAO issues thematic “Insights,” methodological guidance, and good-practice frameworks on everything from major projects to digital delivery. Departments read this not as pre-clearance, but as a radar screen: “If we ignore these warning blips now, we will be skewered later in a value-for-money report.”
The trick is that the NAO never signs off an individual policy or tender. It frames advice at the level of systems, risks and design principles, not as “yes/no” approvals.
That keeps independence fully intact; when the deal goes bad, the NAO is still free to say, “We told you what good looks like. You chose otherwise.” Washington pushes this even further.
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is explicitly mandated to “provide Congress, the heads of executive agencies, and the public with timely, fact-based, non-partisan information” to improve government, and its core functions include not just auditing but “performing policy analyses and outlining options for congressional consideration” and “advising Congress and the heads of executive agencies about ways to make government more efficient and effective.”
GAO staff are in and out of congressional offices constantly, doing briefings and rapid reviews while bills and programmes are still alive and malleable. On top of that, GAO runs one of the most interesting “quasi-concurrent” oversight mechanisms in the world: the federal bid-protest system.
Any disgruntled vendor can challenge the terms of a solicitation or the award of a contract, and GAO acts as an independent forum adjudicating these protests. This is not advisory in the soft sense; these are binding legal decisions and recommendations that can lead to re-tenders or corrective action before a flawed contract fully bites.
Yet, GAO’s independence is not impaired because it never originates the procurement; it simply applies law and standards when others contest the process. Later, if Congress asks for a performance review of that same programme, GAO is perfectly entitled to produce a scathing report.
It has not “approved” the policy; it has policed the process. Canada’s Office of the Auditor General (OAG) plays a similar two-level game. Formally, it “serves Parliament by providing objective, fact-based information and expert advice” and its performance audits and examinations are explicitly described as providing “objective information, advice and assurance” to Parliament and Canadians.
The OAG’s manuals and public statements make it clear that its role is legislative auditing but embedded in that is a steady flow of guidance and informal advisory influence: departments follow its recommendations, study its methodologies, and adjust programme design based on recurring audit findings.
Parliament may be the client of record, but the executive reads the mail. New Zealand’s Auditor-General makes the advisory strand almost impossible to miss. Official descriptions of the office list, alongside annual audits and performance work, explicit responsibilities for “reporting and giving advice to Parliament” and running “inquiries” into matters of concern raised by MPs, the public or the media.
Even more revealing is that Audit New Zealand, working under the Auditor-General’s mandate, carries out “other assurance work … that is reasonable and appropriate for an auditor to perform,” including reviews of procurement and contract management, project and asset management, risk management, governance arrangements, and conflict-of-interest practices. That is textbook pre-decision and mid-stream assurance, all built on the same ethical foundation: advisory, yes; ownership, no.
So how do these institutions avoid becoming junior partners in government? They follow four unwritten commandments.
First, almost all serious advisory work is anchored to the legislature’s oversight role-briefings for committees, thematic reports, and publicly available guidance. That visibility itself protects independence; when advice is on the record, it cannot be quietly weaponised as “audit clearance.”
Second, even when they engage directly with ministries, they couch their work as assurance or review against published standards, never as “approval” of a particular project.
Third, they preserve the right to come back later and criticize the very area they advised on; advice does not become a loyalty clause.
Finally, they maintain a professional code that draws a bright line between giving an opinion on risk and co-signing a decision.
Now, bring this back to New Delhi and the Indian CAG. Legally, nothing stops the CAG from moving in this direction at least at the NAO/OAG/NZ level.
The Balaji judgment of Supreme Court (July 2013) made one specific point: CAG’s constitutional duty is post-facto audit; it cannot be compelled to pre-clear electoral promises or policies. It did not say the CAG is forbidden from offering guidance, sharing risk insights, or conducting near-real-time analytics that Parliament and government can use before they drive off a fiscal cliff.
The “prohibition” is largely cultural, not textual. If, one can posit that the Indian CAG is not hostile to the idea, a pragmatic roadmap exists.
It starts where the global peers began: with Parliament. Committees of Parliament and state legislatures could request focused, forward-looking briefing notes and risk assessments on major schemes, just as GAO and NAO do.
Those notes would be tabled, published, and explicitly labelled as non-binding advisory material. From there, the CAG could develop thematic “insights” and “good-practice” documents on PPPs, huge social and public welfare schemes, digital platforms, defence offsets, or social-sector targeting, mirroring NAO’s and NZ’s guidance work.
As capacity and comfort grow, the CAG could pilot structured assurance reviews of policy initiatives, procurement frameworks or IT system designs, framed not as clearance of a specific tender but as a health check on the system-very much like Audit New Zealand’s procurement and risk-management assurance assignments.
Would this impinge on independence? Only if the CAG lets it. If each advisory product is public, clearly caveated as non-approval, and followed up by the freedom to audit and criticize outcomes later, the Indian CAG would be walking the same tightrope that GAO, NAO, OAG Canada and the NZ Auditor-General have managed for years without falling off.
The real risk is not constitutional; it is psychological. It demands a service that is willing to give up the comfort of arriving late and instead embrace the tension of being relevant early. The way forward, therefore, is not to declare advisory work an un-Indian heresy but to design an Indian version of what the best global SAIs already do: eyes open in real time, hands off the wheel, voice loud enough to be heard before the crash.
If the CAG can make that mental shift, the law will not be the obstacle. The only question will be whether the institution prefers being a commentator on past failures or a co-pilot guarding the taxpayer in real time.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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