The event was hosted by the State Audit Office of Thailand, Chair of the Asian Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (ASOSAI) for the 2021-2024 tenure.
In his opening speech, Thailand's State Auditor General and Chair of ASOSAI 15 Chanathap Indamra said four sub-topics at the symposium will make important contributions to realising ASOSAI’s strategic plan for 2022-2027 and give a panorama of ASOSAI’s activities in the future. They include SAIs and Promoting Good Governance in the Next Normal; SAIs and Encouraging for the Achievement of SDGs; SAIs and Leveraging by using Advanced Technologies for Public Sector Auditing; and SAIs and Responding to Disaster and Pandemic Emerging Issues.
Within the framework of the event, a working group on information technology of the State Audit Office of Vietnam (SAV) led by Deputy Auditor General Phan Truong Giang attended Room C: SAIs and Leveraging by using Advanced Technologies for Public Sector Auditing.
In his discussion paper "Information Technology Audit at the State Audit Office of Viet Nam in the Era of Industrial Revolution 4.0," the Vietnamese representative said the Vietnamese Government is building national databases on financial information . It is expected that by the end of 2021, the country will have completed six major national databases with over 103 national information systems. These are digital resources that need to be tapped in auditing activities through the development of the SAV's specialised databases.
Through the medium of auditing, recordkeeping, internal research and training, the SAV has now in the possession of a huge amount of data warehouses accumulated over years that has not been organised, sorted, and effectively exploited. The aforementioned raw data warehouses need to be organised and arranged automatically by the use AI to form Big Data for auditing works, he said.
The SAV is in the step-by-step progress of conducting audits of IT systems and national databases at the State Bank of Vietnam, the General Department of Taxation, the General Department of Customs and the Vietnam Social Security and has achieved several promising results.
Regarding future orientations for IT audit implementation at the SAV, Giang said his agency will continue completing legal framework and detailed guidance on how to conduct IT audits that have the focus on public digital resources; and conduct annually a preliminary survey of the public digital resource system and establish a specialised database of public digital resources as the focus to gradually build a specialised auditing database. In particular, the focus is placed on data that are available for sharing on Vietnam’s national databases.
