Agenda item

To inform Members of the overall adequacy and effectiveness of the system of internal control and risk management operating throughout 2022/23 and present a summary of the audit work undertaken to formulate the opinion, including reliance placed on work by other bodies.

Mr Minesh Jani, Head of Audit & Risk Management presented the report.

The meeting heard that:

·      A culture of learning and development was prominent in some parts of the Council.

·      When a review was carried out, the reason why information may not be up to date ranged from a host of different reasons. For example, systems hadnot been implemented in a way the service was expecting and therefore it was unclear how the data needed to be utilised. 

·      Housing Systems had gone through a big change to a new system but had not finished with relevant updates so the records were not as thorough as they needed to be. This was true of other parts of the Council.

·      Record keeping also suffered from other issues such as information not being held properly on systems; they may be held in directories or folders and it may be difficult to get hold of certain information when approaching a department collectively. Some information simply was not recorded in a diligent manner and there were also inconsistencies in how information was recorded such as the use of shorthand or abbreviations.  These issues needed to be put right. It would be helpful to have the issues dealt with before a full audit was carried out. This was probably likely to take place next year.

·      Approximately two years ago, a number of reviewstesting procurement in different parts of the Council. The Council was found to be not as effective as it should bein procurement matters. The reports highlighted a number of areas with recommendations and as a result the Council had decided to review procurement operations and the operating model and redesign it along with applications and systems as they were not particularly effective.

·      A decision had also been made to review the staff arrangements regarding the manner in which procurements were carried out. There were three strands to this; how to be clear on when to let and manage a contract, how to be clear on ensuring that the Council accurately gets what it needs (how to specify the proposals) and finally contract registers (how to ensure that the procurement is not something another organisation had procured).

·      The Head of Procurement could be able to provide an update to the Committee.  

·      For voids, the process would change and this may take up until the end of the year. There was an urgency that the voids would be dealt with and brought back to use.  The Housing Directors would be asked for an update.

·      There was oversight of the procurement team independent from the procurement team. This occurred when the value of a contract exceeded £160,000, at which point, strategic procurement became involved in the procurement activity. There was a proposal to reduce the threshold to £25,000 and this would then account for most of the procurement activity.

·      Full Council had noted the different cost amounts delegated to heads of services.

·      Contract management and leisure services was part of plan for 2023/24. The table in the agenda papers contained audit plan from last year and changes that were made from the original plan form last year.

·      Page 81 of the agenda papers, there were four reports waiting to be finalised. Depending on what was indicated by the outlined table, some elements would be taken away and formed into the current year’s audit plan.

·      The Council wanted to improve upon was analysis on where the Council would meet the recommendations. A lot of resources was focused upon on how this would be identified.A lot of the recommendations that had not been implemented related to areas which had various areas of concern including procurement. Two steps would be taken to address the issues. Firstly, the Chief Executive of the Council would see all recommendations implemented in a timely way. The Chief Executive would be informed where recommendations had not been implemented. From an audit perspective, further checks would be carried out regarding implementation and the matter would be escalated, where necessary.

·      DBS checks suffered from issues regarding speed and processing. Some effort needed to be made to understand relationship between schools and other providers in order to attempt to address the issue.

·      Contracts at schools were not internal contract and were managed by schools.   

·      In relation to limited assurance, the number of limited assurances and the areas of limited assurances, these extended beyond procurement and the Homes for Haringey transition and directors were asking for audits in areas of weakness

·      There was an idea of how the Council operated and the operations were risk prioritised those and if there were issues of fraud, then these issues would be targeted. Generally, most of the limited assurances could be attributed to the directors pointing the Audit team in a specific direction or Homes for Haringey but the Audit team played a role in identifying the areas.

·      There were weaknesses in commissioning arrangements in the authority and they were limited to broader issues regarding procurement. Further another perspective was to examine systems and how technology was used set the commissioning arrangements be as effective as possible.

·      The awareness of concerns relating to commissioning was not as high as it was for procurement. However, within the services in commissioning, it was better understood that there was a strong drive to improving commissioning. It was possible to do more to highlight issues in commissioning.

·      There had been four recommendations regarding the carers services which had not been implemented.

RESOLVED:

To note the content of the Head of Audit and Risk Management’s annual audit report and assurance statement for 2022/23.