Meeting documents

The regular progress report from SWAP on the completion of the current Internal Audit Plan, highlighting any high risks that have arisen from their work

Alastair Woodland, Assistant Director SWAP Internal Auditing Services gave an overview of the internal audit progress update, highlighting areas of concern that have been identified from their work.

·         Page 420 provides a summary of the key reviews against the key strategic risks across the organisation.

·         Page 421 shows that the number of outstanding recommendations has increased from 31 to 34, but the number of completed recommendations has also gone up from 70 to 86.

·         SWAP will soon be rolling out a new internal audit dashboard which will significantly improve tracking and monitoring of audit activities across the Council.

·         Page 425 Regarding significant findings around children missing from education. This is about the Section 436a Education Act. This area is under resourced. There is currently no overall policy to manage children missing from education, and not enough data. Recommendations are for completion by the end of Mar ’23 and June ‘23. This will be tracked with the new dashboard.

·         Page 426 refers to follow up audit on schools’ exclusion data. This is about timely and consistent data and the weaknesses identified around data sets and potential for error or manipulation. There are some weaknesses still outstanding, and this will be monitored closely in the new dashboard. 

·         Page 427 Effective of the Somerset Schools forum. 7/10 recommendations have been completed, and the other 3 will be complete by Dec ’22. For this reason, this one is being removed from the dashboard. 

·         Page 433 Appendix D table 2 gives a summary of work done regarding LGR.

·         New CIPFA guidance has been issued regarding audit committee effectiveness.

·         Regarding the audit plan for 23/24, there will be significant disruption going into unitary and welcomed the views of members to ensure that audit work is completed.

He confirmed that members of the committee should have now received written responses regarding both Mental Health Care Plans and Highways Payments Follow-up audits, as requested at the previous meeting on 22^nd September.

The following questions and comments were received from members -

·         Regarding school exclusions, what does this data refer to? All schools or just local authority managed schools? The Assistant Director was unable to answer this but suggested that a Service Manager would be able to provide this information.

·         Regarding school exclusions – do the internal auditors feel that officers are working hard to resolve issues? Are the relationships positive? The Assistant Director acknowledged that LGR has been a significant distraction, as well as other competing authorities but that relationships are positive and as auditors we try to work with officers.

·         Page 423 One member questioned whether this work on LGR was quite late. The Assistant Director assured members that their work on LGR has been ongoing for some time and that it is working at the right pace for the LGR programme.