Agenda item

Head of Audit Cotswolds – for information.

The Head of Audit Cotswolds, Robert Milford, introduced the report. The report is designed to give the Audit Committee the opportunity to comment on the work completed by the Audit Cotswolds partnership and provide ‘through the year’ comment and assurances on the control environment.

The Head of Audit Cotswolds explained that Audit Cotswolds have started finalising work on GO Shared Services. There are areas for improvement which management have agreed to. The Head of Audit Cotswolds said that officers were committed to supporting GO Shared Services and overall he explained that they are working well together. The governance documents which had been put in place to support the GO structure are being worked to and as a result service governance is working effectively.  ICT issues caused a big problem for GO shared services and have also caused problems for housing and the council tax system.

The amount of change GO has been through increases the chance of error, but resources are being focused and they are tackling these problems. The Limited Assurance was good in these circumstances and overall GO is improving and moving forward in a positive direction. The Head of Audit Cotswolds informed members that the COG is working well. He asked if there were any questions. 

In response to a question as to whether there had been unnecessary change at the council, the Head of Audit Cotswolds responded that this was not the case. He gave the analogy of a triangle where each of the three sides is represented by ICT software, staff that operate the system and the end user.  All sides had been in a state of flux and the amount of change that two sides of the triangle had to deal with meant that the end user had also been impacted.

The Head of Audit Cotswolds, in response to the question as to whether GO would reach a satisfactory level within a year, said that it should do. There is a big action plan for GO to tackle, but if this is achieved then a satisfactory level will be reached.

The Chair informed members that he was not surprised by the report. He asked whether previously they had been premature in saying the payroll issues had been resolved.  The Head of Audit Cotswolds responded that resilience and resource levels were better but they were still trying to catch up in other areas. 

There was a reference in the report to updating the Terms of Reference for the JMLG and a member questioned whether these were strategic changes. The Head of Audit Cotswolds responded that the changes referred to were mainly changes to the documentation to reflect that the GO programme had now closed. 

Mark Sheldon, Director of Resources, gave the committee an update on the ICT problems. He explained that the process was very difficult and that the benefit of shared services meant there was now a fresh pair of eyes on the problem as well as a new build of servers.  As a result progress had already been made in resolving the response time issues for Revenues and Benefits.

On a vote the committee unanimously,

RESOLVED that the Internal Audit Monitoring Report be accepted.