Agenda item

To present the report of the Head of Audit and Risk.

The report of the Head of Audit and Risk providing an update as at 31 March, 2023 on the audits completed since the previous update to the Committee as at 31 January, 2023 was presented for the Committee’s consideration. The report also set out the current workload of Internal Audit and its priorities for the short to medium term going forward. Members of the Committee were provided with copies of the five pieces of assurance work completed in the period in relation to Recovering Council Debts and the Impact of Covid-19 (Second Follow Up) (Limited Assurance); Gas Safety Regulatory Compliance (Housing) (Reasonable Assurance), IT Audit – Cloud Management (Reasonable Assurance); Payments supplier maintenance and duplicate payments (Reasonable Assurance) and The Council’s effectiveness in managing its strategic risk YM11 – Poverty (Reasonable Assurance) under separate cover.

The Head of Audit and Risk provided an overview of the report including a summary of the outcome of the work completed and the areas of work currently in progress as at the table at paragraph 38 of the report. She referred to the Limited Assurance Second Follow Up review in relation to Recovering Council Debts and the Impact of Covid-19 which had sought to establish whether management had addressed the outstanding issues/risk raised in the Limited Assurance report dated November, 2021. Although the review found that the Service had made some positive progress, Internal Audit was unable to increase the assurance rating from Limited the reason being that the IT consultancy firm commissioned to work with the Service to address the issues and risks raised and improve processes within the Income section has made limited progress because they had been redeployed to work on the Capita Revenue system upgrade.  She confirmed the appointment of a new Senior Auditor who had commenced in post on 1 April, 2023 and advised that the budget savings from the one remaining vacant post at Senior Auditor level are being utilised to commission external support including technical IT audit from the IT Audit Team at Salford Council. Work is progressing to support services with implementing all outstanding actions with more detailed information about the status of outstanding actions provided in a separate report to the meeting.

The Committee asked for an update on the position with regard to bad debt in the context of the Limited Assurance Second Follow-Up report on Recovering Council Debt and the Impact of Covid-19.

The Director of Function (Resources)/Section 151 Officer advised that there had been a slight decrease in the collection of Council Tax in year due in all likelihood to the cost of living crisis. The collection of Council Tax is not a one year process when the range of recovery and enforcement actions and the time those take to implement are taken into account; however the sanction of imprisonment which would be pursued in the event that all other options fail is no longer available in Wales and has made dealing with problematic debts all the more difficult. The Council has increasingly introduced in advance online payments for services including green garden waste collection and planning fees and while there are debts that are still difficult to collect such as social care fees and housing benefit overpayments the Council has not experienced a significant rise in debt as yet. A staffing restructure has resulted in the creation of a dedicated Recovery Manger post and work is being undertaken to make the  income recovery process through all its stages more efficient and effective including improving the service’s performance indicators. In response to a further query about there being a budget for bad debt, the Section 151 Officer clarified that while there is no specific budget as such, with regard to Council Tax, the tax base is set at 98.5% of the total which allows for a 1.5% loss covering provision for bad debt as well as changes in year with regard to discounts and exemptions. As non-domestic rates are pooled centrally, the pool rather than the Council, suffers the loss for non-payment and other sundry debts are reflected in services’ income budgets when those are set.

It was resolved to accept the update and to note Internal Audit’s assurance provision and priorities going forward.