Issue - meetings

Report of the Director – Finance and Corporate Services

Ms Norman from Forvis Mazars, the council’s external auditors presented the External Audit Completion Report 2024/25, which summarised the audit of the Statement of Accounts.

Ms Norman said that work had been substantially completed with areas still outstanding listed on page 40 of the report, with the colours indicating the likelihood of a material misstatement arising from those areas. She said that the pension fund auditor assurance was still pending but that it was not expected for there to be any issues for the anticipated unmodified external audit opinion.

Ms Norman clarified that the covering report mentioned a deadline of 30 September but said that the deadline was the same as the back stop and she assured Members of the Group that the statutory deadline had been met. She said that there was a new deadline specifically for value for money work and that work was being carried out under the new NAO code of audit practice which meant that they had to issue their draft conclusions by 30 November, which had been met with the report presented to Committee at this meeting.

Ms Norman referred to page 62 of the report, appendix A, and the recommendation related to an unadjusted misstatement awaiting response at the time of the report but which she could now inform Members of the Group was likely to be circa £196k which was well below the material threshold but

above the reporting threshold. She explained that the recommendation related to the timely removal of assets that were no longer in use from the Council’s fixed assets register. She added that there some adjusted misstatements which were cumulatively above the trigger threshold and which related to IFRS16.

Councillor Thomas asked about reference to wrong accounting under for the new standards. Ms Norman said that this related to an investment property and the Head of Finance explained that it was an asset that the Council already had in its asset register that was then brought under the scope of IFRS16 and when added to the IFRS16 asset register it had not subsequently been removed as an investment property.

Councillor Polenta asked about assets of zero value, with reference to the Council repairing rather than having a capital replacement program and asked about managing future risk associated with that. The Head of Finance said that as part of the capital program, the life of an asset was assessed and  replacement would be planned into the capital program when it was coming to the end of that lifespan, however, if at the anticipated point of replacement it was determined that the asset did not need to be replaced as yet, then replacement would just be carried forward in the capital programme and would still be budgeted for.

It was RESOLVED that the Governance Scrutiny Group:

a)             Approved the findings of Forvis Mazars Audit Completion Report (Appendix 1)

b)             Approved the Draft Management Representation Letter (Appendix 2).