Agenda item
Internal Audit - Progress Report
Minutes:
The Head of Worcestershire Internal Audit Shared Service reported that data sets continued to be uploaded to central database as part of the National Fraud Initiative (NFI) matching exercise. The role of internal audit was in providing support to services which were uploading their audit documentation. Internal audit expected that most data sets would be received by December. It was added there were no exceptions to report in terms of fraud or other serious risk.
The Head of Worcestershire Internal Audit Shared Service reported that work on Core Financial Systems continued to occupy a substantial part of the internal audit team’s planned time because of the rectification work associated with the Council’s new finance system. Regular meetings were taking place with the Head of Finance and Customer Services in order to achieve progress in this area.
The Head of Worcestershire Internal Audit Shared Service explained that work continued on making progress with respect to areas which returned a level of ‘limited’ assurance as reported in the Internal Audit Annual Report at the July meeting. It was highlighted that progress was also made with respect of the assurance work for the Leisure Strategy.
Following the presentation of the report, Members expressed serious concerns that the Council appeared to continue to receive ‘limited’ assurance in core areas of Council business such as Safeguarding and Fire Safety and in light of this the Chairman indicated he would write to request the Chief Executive Officer’s attendance at a subsequent meeting of the Committee to discuss how the Council’s performance could be progressed to ‘full’ assurance in these areas. Members concurred with the Chairman on the need to invite the Chief Executive Officer to a subsequent meeting of the Committee.
The Chairman further expressed his disappointment that the Committee had not been updated on the current audit assurance status in areas of Safeguarding and Fire Safety, nor had Members received assurance that the recommendations of the last follow up audits in these areas were being implemented.
The Chairman commented that audits for service areas had been investigated in isolation, without the Committee receiving a holistic picture of the corporate approach to audit assurance and performance monitoring, and consequently the Committee had little confidence that there was a corporate improvement. It was noted that, as presented in the 2021/22 Internal Audit Annual Report at the July meeting, a number of key areas such as budget monitoring and risk management were provided with ‘limited’ or ‘no’ assurance by the internal auditors, which some Members deemed unacceptable.
The Interim Director of Finance added that for the finance team, mostly composed of new staff, it was equally frustrating that work on rectification was taking the majority of the team’s time, for example with the 2020/21 Statement of Accounts which had not been finalised yet due to issues with the cash receipting module of the finance system. Actions were now being taken to improve assurance across the organisation. For example, a new approach to budget setting was now taken with budget setting undertaken in two tranches, one in the pre-Christmas period and the second allowing for adjustment after the local government finance settlement had been published by the Government. In addition, one Corporate Management Team (CMT) meeting per month was devoted exclusively to discussions of assurance.
RESOLVED that the report be noted.
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