Agenda item

The Strategic Audit Plan documents significant, persistent risks that the Council faces and the business areas to be covered over a five-year period.  The Strategic Plan supports the annual planning process and ensures that internal audit continues to provide assurance over the breadth of the Council’s operations.

Moira Mackie (Head of Internal Audit) presented the Strategic Audit Plan which documented significant, persistent risks that the Council faced and the business areas to be covered over a five-year period. The Strategic Plan supported the annual planning process and ensured that internal audit continued to provide assurance over the breadth of the Council’s operations.

David Hughes (Director of Audit, Fraud, Risk and Insurance) added that the way of flexible planning and focusing on key risks was now commonly adopted by the sector across London and in line with the new global internal audit standard. It helped to demonstrate assurance around the Council’s objectives and key priority areas. He informed members that a paper on the new global internal audit standard, together with the requirements and best practices of internal audit as well as the role of audit committees would be prepared for this Committee’s consideration in due course.  

Councillor Florian Chevoppe-Verdier noted that one of the changes to the way of delivering the Internal Audit Service was to increase the attendance on working groups to provide advice and constructive challenge where real time input to projects and initiatives would be useful (page 390).  He was concerned about the transparency of these working groups, including the membership, meeting details and minutes.

In response, David Hughes cited the example of the Civic Campus project where good governance arrangements and records had been in place such that officers, having recognised the key risks, continued to review the effectiveness of mitigation actions taken. Another example was the Housing’s repairs service.  Instead of doing the audits, the internal audit team worked proactively alongside with them in the last 12 to 18 months to make sure the risks were assessed and tracked, and the action plans were robust and monitored.   The internal audit team had actively been involved in these working groups but no formal report had been prepared at the end of the process.  David suggested adding the working groups’ updates to the progress report.  Councillor Chevoppe-Verdier supported as it helped enhance the Committee’s understandings of the working groups and reflected the internal audit team’s strength in interventions.

    ACTION: David Hughes / Moira Mackie

Noting from the Draft Internal Audit Plan 2024/25 that it was planned to review readiness for voter ID and postal voting controls in the second quarter, Councillor Ashok Patel considered the timeframe was rather late given the mayoral election was happening on 2 May and the general election any time before January 2025. David Hughes remarked that again, instead of doing traditional audit, the team would work alongside officers to review the process and improve controls while giving assurance. As the issue of voter ID was more significant on the general election, the internal audit team would work with elections colleagues during the process to make sure the postal votes and the elections came through successfully.  

Councillor Rowan Ree (Cabinet Member for Finance and Reform) said he understood that over the last few months, the election and registration team had been looking at election reports in particular those involving borough-wide election under the new system.  At the request of Councillor Chevoppe-Verdier, David Hughes said he could provide an update on the work done in relation to the mayoral election at the next Committee meeting on 17 June 2024.  Members agreed.

    ACTION: David Hughes / Moira Mackie

RESOLVED

That the Committee noted the early draft of the Annual Audit Plan and the draft Strategic Audit Plan as set out in Appendices 1 and 2 respectively.