The purpose of this report is to enable the committee to provide independent assurance on the adequacy of the risk management framework together with the internal control of the financial reporting and annual governance processes by considering the head of internal audit’s annual report and opinion, and the level of assurance it gives over the council’s corporate governance arrangements. 

The Director of Continuous Improvement (DCI) for South West Audit Partnership (SWAP) presented the report on Internal Audit Annual Opinion 2023/24. The purpose of the annual report was outlined; attention was drawn to Appendix A - Internal Audit Annual Opinion 2023/24.  The following key areas were highlighted:

·       There were no ‘High’ residual organisational risks that had been identified throughout the year.

·       There were no instances of material risks throughout the year where management did not accept the need for mitigating action.

·       SWAP is providing insight and support in relation to the development of the risk management framework, based on their experiences in other local authorities.

·       Following the departure of several of the councils corporate performance team , SWAP will now provide reporting and updates with regards to “following up on agreed actions”, utilising AuditBoard to provide a live view to key council stakeholders of all outstanding audit actions across the authority.

·       In relation to customer satisfaction questionnaires, 17 had been returned (a return rate of 74%, from the 23 issued), feedback was strong; especially in relation to SWAP’S professionalism and conduct.

In response to committee questions, it was noted:

1.     The DCI explained the process for issuing and obtaining customer satisfaction surveys.

2.     The DCI explained that not all audits will have a one to one relationship, but they would still try and make linkages where possible. Swap link all their work to the key risks and priorities, however will undertake other audits if and when requested to do so.

3.     The DCI provided the committee with assurance that all past actions had been provided by the performance team and that they were currently being loaded on to their Auditboard system. It was noted that some of these actions were historic and work would been carried out to identify those actions that were no longer required or no longer relevant. Swap would be provide the committee with an update at the meeting in July.

4.     The DCI explained that normally a risk would be identified on one of the councils risk registers and there would be mitigating actions in place, where a risk is not recorded of no mitigating controls in place, SWAP would produce a list of expected controls to mitigate that risk. SWAP would formulate Audit tests to test each one of those controls and then give a view on the effectiveness.

5.     The DCI explained that the Annual Opinion 2023/24 is retrospective and that it should be noted that the authority’s strategic risk register was significantly updated in March 2024. Therefore SWAP had provided a coverage assessment against the risks that appeared on the strategic risk register throughout 2023/24. The risks removed in this refresh had been prefixed with “Deescalated” in the Year-end assessment of internal audit coverage mapped to strategic risk as listed on page 199.

RESOLVED

That the committee:

a)    noted the report and considered the assurance provided by the annual opinion report.