Internal Auditor

Question

Can a parish council refuse to give the contact details of a internal auditor who has signed off accounts which have been subsequently been shown to been compiled and signed off in error?

Answer 1

To whom? Depends on the retention position of the auditor(eg direct employee, company, honorarium etc. ) this would define what information the council can and cannot divulge to a third party. I would have thought that if the internal auditor has erred it is for the council and main auditor to investigate and correct between them.

Comments

An internal auditor must be independent of the Council so can't be an employee.
As the auditor must sign the AGAR, the internal auditors details are in the public domain anyway.  If he or she hasn't done their job properly, that is a matter for the council to take up with their auditor as they would be a contractor and should carry professional indemnity insurance.

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Apologies for incorrect tense: employed not employee

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I agree. The council will not take this up with the auditor. We will ask for a response given to the council, but this will be ignored. The auditor is not an employee, we do not know who he is. I must be missing something here. Why can "councillors" treat their parishioners like dirt?

Answer 2

The details will be in the public domain or should be, because they will have signed and dated the internal audit part of the AGAR so their name should be on the bottom of that.

Comments

Their name is on the AGAR, but it is just a name. Google searches of the name show nothing. Who is this person. Parishioners have no idea. We are just applying the 7 principles of public life which should be in the background of any question. What is there to hide? There is a major error in the acounts, please see other answer.

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There must have (should have) been a motion of the PC to appoint the IA. The terms of Appointment of IA is a requirement of the practitioners guide - if there is no motion then that of itself may be a reportable non-compliance. Do you have access to latest version of the practitioners guide?

Answer 3

To what end?

Genuinely, nobody is in the slightest bothered or interested in internal nor external audit and I include in that internal auditors who are poorly equipped and I’ll informed, external auditors that don’t care when a PC reports a complete rejection of IA findings within an AGAR and PCs that don’t understand or don’t even bother to submit an AGAR.
For the 21/22 AGAR it was identified that the IA was incompetent and unfit for purpose resulting in the PC having to ‘accept’ their report as submitted (which included incorrect reference) but then showing a complete opposit on part 2 of AGAR.
EA response - well it’s OK.
It’s no wonder 28 of the 29 PIRs for 21/22 were for non submission.
IA / EA - complete waste of time and effort.
A bit like this question which is poorly constructed, ambiguous and vague.
Rubbish in equals rubbish out.

Comments

Correction - 20/21 not 21/22 (they’re not out yet)

But as an illustration of exactly how pointless audit currently is look at Kirkby Muxloe PIR dated for year ended Mar 21.
The current EA (PFK Littlejohn) are ‘unable to complete their work’ from 17/18, 18/19, 19/20, & 20/21 until the PREVIOUS auditor ( Grant Thornton) have completed their work from 14/15, 15/16, & 17/18!

It’s 2022 and this PC has been unable to sign off since 2014!
Only the EU has a worse track record!

And yet still nothing happens.

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https://saaa.co.uk/reports.html

Here’s the link

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I am sorry I do not know why this is such an aggressive reply. The question was a generic one to start off with. OK let us give some detail which can be seen in the accounts. The council gave £40,000 to a private limited company under a financial charge registered at companies house. This money came to the council from a renewable company as a community "grant" for a solar park application. That charge effectively disappeared when the grant was passed to the private limited company, as it was written off in the income and expenditure section of the AGAR, This disappeared for 3 years, It should have passed to the assets part of the AGAR represented by the financial charge. As a finance professional, I call this at the least sloppy. However the management of the private company has personnel who are also councillors. These councillors have not put this company, which is in the parish, on their register of interests. I hope this now highlights a possible issue. I welcome any more questions for clarification.

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It’s unfortunate that you interpret frustration (with the audit system) as ‘aggression.’  Can’t help you with that.
The internal and external audit process is meaningless. Now that you have elaborated with more detail - which I can see from what you have relayed is what anyone might reasonably think of as being ‘significant.’

Now try raising this concern with the IA and EA and see where that gets you.
I suspect you may find yourself falling in line with the obvious frustration that you interpret from my earlier post.