Agenda item

The Committee received an Internal Audit Progress Report from the Head of Worcestershire Internal Audit Shared Service. The report before the Committee summarised progress made against the delivery of the Internal Audit Plan 2023/24 as to the end of July 2023. It was noted that there were residual reviews to complete from the 2022/23 Plan with one review finalised since the last Committee meeting relating to Benefits and further three reviews awaiting management sign off.

Regarding the 2023-24 Internal Audit Plan there was a small delay reported in July to two areas of audit work due to a key officer on extended leave. These two areas would be progressed within the next quarter.

The Committee was updated that the audit of Mayoral Accounts requested at previous meetings was now completed and at draft report stage. The final review report would be presented at the next meeting of the Committee.

It was reported that National Fraud Initiative (NFI) data set uploads were planned for December 2023 and January 2024. The results from the 2022/23 uploads were currently being investigated by the various Service areas who were investigating and taking appropriate action on the results.

It was noted that no follow up audits were included in the documents for this Committee meeting but several follow up audits were due which would be reported to the next Committee meeting. There were no exceptions to report at this meeting.

The Head of Worcestershire Internal Audit Shared Service commented that routine meetings with the Head of Finance and Customer Services continued to provide ongoing monitoring of the situation around the financial ledger system.

Following the report presentation, the Committee discussed a number of matters relating to the report with the following comments and answers to questions noted:

·       A detailed debate took place around paragraph 8.1 of the report around main risks associated with the details included in the internal audit report, namely the risks of the internal audit programme of work being insufficiently completed for the financial year so that annual opinion could not be given and that a continuous provision of an internal audit service could not be maintained.

·       It was highlighted that this was a standard section within internal audit reports underlining the worst-case scenario risks for the delivery of the service – it was a list of inherent risks for internal audit. Members raising this question commented that this was understood, however, given that only 49 out of 365 allocated internal audit days were used to end of July 2023 was a cause of concern and needed to be highlighted as a real risk. It was also suggested that the reporting format be updated so that Members had a clearer idea from the reports about the state of delivery of the internal audit plan.

It was requested as an action for Officers that a short paragraph summarising progress against the Internal Audit Plan be included together with summary dashboard table (under section 2 – background) in future iterations of the Internal Audit Progress Report. It was commented that this would enable Members to understand the real progress more clearly against the delivery of the Internal Audit Plan.

RESOLVED that

the report be noted.