National Assembly Vice Chair Nguyen Thi Hong noted that globalization, international integration, modern governance trends, digital transformation, the application of AI and big data, and requirements to achieve sustainable development goals are profoundly altering national governance methods.

The need to ensure that public resources are mobilized, allocated, managed and used transparently, efficiently and sustainably is increasingly pressing.

Hong said supreme audit institutions must not only examine whether the management and use of resources comply with regulations, but also enhance their ability to provide information for governance, help identify risks and assess the effectiveness of public resource utilization.

Meanwhile, AI, big data analytics, geographic information systems, satellite imagery and real-time auditing are opening up new ways to access, process and analyze information. However, technological advances also require stronger professional capabilities, updated auditing methods and improved institutional frameworks to ensure these tools are used appropriately.

Sharing India’s experience at a recent seminar, K. Sanjay Murthy, Comptroller and Auditor General of India, said the country’s audit institution was making greater use of data and technology to improve auditing efficiency.

India’s legal framework allows its audit institution to access data for the performance of its assigned duties. This includes extracting data from operational systems or collecting data periodically for centralized analysis in an audit data warehouse.

In practice, India’s audit institution has used image-analysis applications to screen and process data from around 10 million images, while also leveraging satellite imagery and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

One example cited by Murthy was an assessment of the Housing for All welfare program, which supports poor households in building permanent homes. Under the plan, UAV flights were conducted across 11 urban areas covering 10 square kilometers and six rural areas covering 5 square kilometers, with the entire survey area covered within one month.

This allowed the audit institution to identify cases in which homes had been recorded as completed and full support payments had been disbursed, even though construction had not yet begun.

Vietnam plans to pilot AI in at least two areas of auditing

In Vietnam, Deputy State Auditor General Ha Thi My Dung said the State Audit Office of Vietnam aims to pilot AI applications in at least two core auditing areas in 2026 to support data analysis and quality control.

Under this plan, AI could help auditors process information faster, identify anomalies and formulate more precise audit questions. However, the technology cannot independently generate all the evidence needed to reach a conclusion.

“AI-generated findings must still be checked for their origin, integrity and traceability. Information verification, professional judgment and responsibility for audit conclusions remain with the auditors,” Dung stressed.

This shows that adopting AI is not simply a matter of adding technology to existing procedures. It also requires changes to working methods, quality-control processes and the way audit evidence is managed.

In a report submitted to the seminar, Senior Lieutenant General Pham The Tung, Deputy Minister of Public Security, noted that one current challenge is that auditing legislation provides relatively broad powers to request information and documents but does not yet fully clarify the mechanisms for centralized and interconnected data access.

At the same time, the right to access data for auditing must be balanced against the obligation to protect personal data. The databases the State Audit Office of Vietnam needs to access may contain large volumes of personal information or sensitive personal data in areas such as taxation, banking and insurance.

According to Tung, auditing authority should not be understood as granting unlimited access to all data. Data extraction must follow the principle of data minimization, meaning that only information fields necessary for the audit purpose should be used.

Drawing on international experience and the challenges facing Vietnam, it is important to establish clear data-access mechanisms, ensure information security, strengthen analytical capabilities and maintain professional accountability for every audit conclusion.

When deployed alongside an appropriate legal framework and rigorous control procedures, AI and big data can help audit institutions identify risks earlier, broaden the scope of analysis and provide more reliable information. The ultimate goal remains to improve transparency, efficiency and sustainability in the management of public resources.

Ngoc Ha