To update members on the progress of internal audit work and to bring to their attention any key internal control issues arising from work recently completed.

To assure the committee that action is being taken on risk related issues identified by internal audit. This is monitored through acceptance of agreed management actions and progress updates in implementing the action plans. In addition, occasions where audit actions not accepted by management are documented if it is considered that the course of action proposed by management presents a risk in terms of the effectiveness of or compliance with the council’s control environment. 

Note: Paper to follow;

Appendix A SWAP Internal Audit Progress Report Quarter 4 2024-25

The Head of Internal Audit (HIA) introduced two members of her team, Josie Bollen - Principal Auditor and Ravi Taggar - Senior Auditor. She highlighted that there was currently a vacancy in her team but said this would not impact on the delivery of the annual opinion.

She introduced the report of which had been issued as a supplement to the agenda.

The principal points were noted:

1.     No high organisational risks, limited assurances, or priority one or two findings had been identified.

2.     Two audits had been completed since the last progress report with 15 currently in progress and 3 at draft report stage.

3.     There had been some delays in finalising some of the work this quarter but in anticipation of the annual opinion, it was hoped that at least 13 of those 15 audits would have moved through and would feed into the annual opinion.

4.     Risk coverage covered on pages 10-11 showed coverage against Swaps top 10 risks having decided to remove the coverage of the current corporate risks whilst these were being finalised. Once the corporate risk registers were finalised, she would go back to the rolling plan and map future audits to the risks, identifying any gaps in coverage and then go back out to the key officers and senior management in the Council to determine if any extra audits were needed or if there were sufficient assurance from other sources.

5.     Action tracking was still successful and a further 5 actions had been closed off since the last update. No actions had revised time scales. It was her aim that the 91 actions that still remained would be closed off by the annual opinion.

6.     At present a 100% feedback score was being achieved.

In response to committee questions, it was noted.

      I.         Audit #3772 and #3749 as recorded on page 6 were requested by the Director of Finance and currently are classed as confidential but as testing and as the journey progresses this may change. The HIA had no significant concerns but would bring that to the attention of the committee if necessary.

     II.         Determining what projects, are looked at would be done on a risk-based approach and would involve key officers, looking at reputational damage, financial damage the size of the project and where an audit can offer the most value.

The committee noted the report.