Issue - meetings

Report CEO 1409

The Internal Audit Progress Report was written by Luis Remedios, Head of Audit.

The report informed Members of recent audit activity across the Council and provided updates on matters arising from the last Audit Sub Committee. It covered:

  Priority One Recommendations

  Audit Activity

  Waivers

  Publication of Internal Audit Reports

  Auditor of the Year

  Housing Benefit Update

  Other Matters

  Risk Management

The Head of Audit introduced the report by explaining that this report covered the last two months of internal audit activity. There would be a further report written in September 2014, and this would be circulated to the Audit Sub-Committee Members by email in October 2014. Much time had been spent on completing work from the previous year, and much time had also been given to the investigation of the part two fraud investigations.

The Committee referred to Section 3.5 of the report on page 50 of the agenda—Looked After Children (LAC). It was noted that two areas of concern had been identified by the London Borough of Wandsworth Audit Team. The first of these was that proper controls for evidencing funding approvals for placement decisions were not in place. In one instance it was identified that an over payment of £11,336.00 had been made; action had been taken to recover the over payment.

A secondary issue that had been identified with respect to LAC, was that the completion of assessments and reviews was often failing to take place within statutory timescales. If this was not rectified, there was a danger of both sanctions and reputational damage.

Recommendations to deal with these issues were being implemented.

The Committee referred to Section 3.7 of the report. This was another audit problem that had been identified by the LBW Audit Team. It was noted that there were problems in many services around the issue of ordering and invoices. There were many cases where orders had been raised after invoices had been received. This caused problems in that commitment to expenditure was not reflected in budgets. The Vice Chairman expressed surprise and concern at this, and stated that it was really an easy problem to solve. The matter had been raised  by  the Chief Executive, in recent meetings with chief officers and senior managers and it was clear that this practice was not acceptable. Members had asked if the worst offenders were being targeted and the Head of Audit responded that they were but given the number of retrospective orders of 3,290 over a four month period it was a corporate problem. This recommendation was accepted by management for  implementation. 

The Committee noted Section 3.8 (page51) of the report, which related to TCES (Transforming Community Equipment Services). It was noted that there had been numerous problems with the verification of Invoices Submitted as outlined in the report. It appeared that there were no proper audit trails or challenges, no proper stock control, differences in the charge out rate for non-stock items stored to that specified  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7