Issue - meetings

Committee considered a report which provided a progress update in respect of implementing recommendations arising from the external review of internal audit.

Appendix 1 to the report detailed the recommendations made by the external reviewer, the proposed action and an update of the progress achieved so far. 

Some recommendations had already been implemented and others were in progress.  A number of the recommendations would be implemented from the 2022/23 financial year in order to avoid changing systems mid–year and also to provide time to train staff. 

The main focus of the recommendations related to ensuring that internal audit continued to increase their focus on risk and align to the Council’s risk appetite.

In order to do this, Internal Audit had aligned its assurance levels and recommendation priorities to the risk levels within the Council’s Risk Management Strategy.  The likely impact of this was that there would be more low priority recommendations as the Council’s risk appetite, as defined in its Strategy, was higher than Internal Audit’s current definitions.  A medium internal audit recommendation would be more significant than at present.

All Internal Audit’s documentation had been reviewed and updates had been made to the scoping document, audit test schedule and report template, to further embed risk management throughout the audit process.

A further update on progress would be presented to a future meeting of the Committee as part of the 2021/22 Internal Audit Annual Report.

Moved by Councillor Graham Parkin and seconded by Councillor Chris Kane

RESOLVED that the report be noted.