Agenda item

The Committee received a Business Assurance Strategy update which contained the internal audit plan. The report provided an update on the internal audit work being undertaken by the Business Assurance Team against the approved 2023/24 plan. The 2023/24 Internal Audit Plan had been reviewed to identify the key audit activities to be delivered considering the priorities within the directorates and working around any key service priorities. Delivery of the overall Business Assurance work plans, including internal audit, helped ensure that there was an appropriate governance and control framework in place and that risk management was embedded across the Council to enable the achievement of set objectives. Ms Maggie Gibb, Chief Auditor and Head of Business Assurance presented the report.

During discussion, points raised included:

·   Given the short period of time since the last Committee meeting along with the Christmas period there had been limited movement since the last meeting, although a considerable amount of work was ongoing with quarter 4 being the busiest quarter of the year for the team. A number of audits would be delivered over the coming weeks with a number being reported back to the Committee at its March meeting.

·   Five reports were at a draft stage with a further six engagements in progress and five grant certifications having been completed and submitted.

·   Reporting in the audit action tracker had now been split to clearly display actions outstanding for schools and non-school related actions. The overdue schools’ actions had been progressed since the report was published. Regular reporting on overdue actions went through directorate leadership teams and CMT to ensure actions were being progressed.

·   A new Corporate Governance and Assurance Board had been established, this was chaired by the Deputy Chief Executive and absorbed the work of the former Audit Board. Two audit deferrals had been agreed as highlighted at paragraph 4.11 of the report, these related to partnership arrangements and the teacher pension scheme. Reasoning behind these were that the partnership audit had moved from high to medium priority and the new system for teacher pensions was not yet live. An additional internal audit was planned for staff expenses and overtime claims, this would be completed in quarter 4 to support the AURA change programme.

·   In relation to counter fraud, the Committee was advised that there would be an annual report and the internal reporting of cases was being improved with a view to present a summary of recent cases to the Committee in the confidential section of a future meeting.

·   A Member identified a labelling issue to the graph on page 69 of the reports pack, it appeared to run to August 2023, although the key ran to April 2023. These would be reviewed along with improving categorisation and providing more granular detail and information on trends at the next meeting.

·   In response to a query around benchmarking against other local authorities, this would form part of the annual report with a trend analysis comparison to neighbouring authorities.

RESOLVED:

That the report be noted.