Issue - meetings

The report outlines the progress of the Council’s Internal Audit service against the approved Internal Audit Plan for 2022/23 from 1 April 2023.

[15 Minutes]

            The Chair welcomed Iona Bond, Senior Audit and Counter Fraud Manager,from Southern Internal Audit Partnership (SIAP), who then presented the report to the Committee. The report outlined the progress of the Council’s Internal Audit service against the approved Internal Audit Plan for 2022/23 from 1 April 2023. Progress so far had been very positive, and the Senior Audit and Counter Fraud Manager thanked the Officers for their help. She went through each section of the report and highlighted that page 18 showed 17% of the work had been completed, and 25% was in progress; Section 4 contained the analysis of ‘Live’ audit reviews, which showed managers and Officers had been completing all agreed management actions from the 2022-23 audit report, and from this there were only 7 management actions overdue. Due to the number of actions, this was a pleasing level of overdue actions; A verbal update was provided regarding the Environment Health and Protection Food Safety Audit on page 21, which was due to begin very shortly. This meant all work from quarters 1 and 2 had commenced; Economic Regeneration had been removed as shown in Section 8. This had originally been included due to the Council’s ongoing projects, however due to the current stages of these projects it was now felt unnecessary to include for 2023-24. This would be reviewed in 2024-25; Annexes 1 and 2 showed the overdue Management Actions. The Senior Audit and Counter Fraud Manager was satisfied with the reasons for these being overdue.

Members then took part in a question and answer session where the following points were raised:

• Was the priority rating for overdue management actions decided internally or externally by SIAP? There was particular interest in the ‘Use of Agency Workers’ being given a medium rating. The Senior Audit and Counter Fraud Manager explained management assigned the ratings, however this was reviewed by SIAP, who would engage in conversations with Officers if they were not in agreement. The Group Head of Finance and Section 151 Officer explained to Members that all audits that had limited assurances on them were monitored directly by the Corporate Management Team.
• It was asked what data protection training would be rolled out to Councillors. The Group Head of Finance and Section 151 Officer explained this would come under the remit of the Monitoring Officer and an answer would be circulated to Members after the meeting.

The report was noted.