Bhubaneswar: Retired Odia IAS officer and the Comptroller Auditor General (CAG) of India Girish Chandra Murmu has been reappointed as the chairman of the panel of external auditors of the United Nations for the year 2021.
The panel consists of 13 countries—India, Germany, Chile, China, United Kingdom, France, Philippines, Switzerland, Italy, Ghana, Indonesia, Canada and Russia.
The UN General Assembly had established the Panel of External Auditors in 1959, comprising individual external auditors of the United Nations system, who are also the CAG of their respective countries.
The 1985-batch IAS officer of Gujarat cadre was elected as chairman of the panel for 2020. He was also a member of the UN Board of Auditors for two terms from 1993 to 1999 and from 2014 to 2020.
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At present, he is the external auditor of the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva (2020-2023) and Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), Rome (2020 – 2025) and Inter-Parliamentary Union (2020-2022) among others.
A native of Mayurbhanj district, Murmu had opted for voluntary retirement in 2019.
Murmu made headlines in October 2019 with his appointment as the first Lieutenant Governor of Union Territory of Jammu & Kashmir. However, on the first anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370, he resigned and was later appointed as the CAG, the first Odia to be appointed to the post, in August last year.
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