Ahead of merger, State Bank of India   (SBI) has called upon retired officers to become concurrent auditors with the bank to oversee compliance and risks under loans and operational activities.

Concurrent audits are real-time examination of transactions to ensure accuracy, bank compliance, and to prevent frauds. It involves audit of a bank’s financial transactions while they are taking place, verifying loan and deposit accounts, sanctioning processes, bill transactions, foreign Exchange, cash transactions and all other day- to-day activities in the Bank including external compliance. It is part of a bank’s early warning system to ensure timely detection of irregularities and lapses, and helps prevent fraudulent transactions at branches.

"We generally hire retired officers for many other roles. In this case, we thought why should our serving people be there because the retired people are more adept with the bank’s compliance processes with more experience in the industry as well…they know the business better.

They also come at cheaper cost to us," said Rajnish Kumar, Managing Director at State Bank of India. In 2015, the Reserve Bank of India asked banks to bring new areas posing risk under the purview of concurrent audit. It also said that the branches with high risk are to be subjected to concurrent audit irrespective of their business size.

Many specialised branches such as agriculture, SME, corporate, retail assets, portfolio management, treasury, forex and back office among others are also covered under concurrent audit. Last year, SBI also witnessed a major security data breach on its 6 lakh ATM card holders of the 32 lakh cards compromised in the banking system.

This has raised alarm bells for banks, card companies, ATM operators and cyber security firms. After approval by the government this month, the country’s largest bank is set to merge five of its subsidiary banks with itself and integrate all its customers, technology and processes. The audits will be the need of the hour given that the merger will have on-boarded newer customers and employees. Typically, SBI recruits about 100-200 such auditors to oversee the role and SBI will be looking at the retired officers above grade four specialised in the IT and security department. #casansaar (Source - Money Control)