Agenda item

Report of the Corporate Director Resources (Section 151 Officer). Deferred item from last meeting.

Please see attached link for appendices, included in the agenda for the last meeting https://wyre.moderngov.co.uk/documents/b5514/Statement%20of%20Accounts%20pre-audit%20202122%20appendices%2027th-Sep-2022%2018.00%20Audit%20Committee.pdf?T=9.

The Corporate Director Resources had submitted the Statement of Accounts 2021/22, for the committee to approve the council’s published accounts and the final capital and revenue position for the financial year 2021/22 at the last meeting. Owing to having to self-isolate, the Corporate Director had attended virtually, and felt that it would have affected the quality of discussion on the item. It had been proposed that this item would be deferred until this meeting, with a question and answer document circulated in the meantime to give the committee the opportunity to thoroughly review the document and the accounts prior to this meeting.

The Corporate Director Resources reminded members that the draft statement of account could be subject to change, after the finalisation of the audit. She asked members, as she noted they had been concerned over the quality of their scrutiny of the accounts at the previous meeting, how they had found the exercise of scrutinising the accounts and the additional question and answer document in their own time.

Members mentioned how they had felt comfortable in reading the reports in their own time as it allowed them to absorb the information more than going through everything in one meeting; however some members highlighted the large volume of information they had been required to go through. Some thought that an in-person presentation had a greater impact.

Following discussion, the committee approved the published draft Statement of Accounts and the final capital and revenue position for the financial year 2021/22.

After the approval of the accounts, The Corporate Director Resources also updated the committee on where the accounting work was up to. She said that the majority of the work for the 2020/21 audit had been completed, with additional resources brought in to deal with the backlog. However, the issue of the infrastructure assets was still ongoing, and she was not optimistic that it would be solved before Christmas.

The external auditor from Deloitte, Stuart Kenny, told the committee that updates to the way auditors dealt with local authority infrastructure assets was going to the committee stage in the House of Commons in November, with the hope it would be taken back to the Commons and agreed late December. However, this was unlikely to happen and they would also have to await guidance from CIPFA which had now been delayed to January 2023. He did tell the committee that he believed that the rest of the audit work was progressing well, with the infrastructure assets being the only work not completed.

In terms of the 2021/22 audit, no work had been started on this yet. They were hoping to push this into the New Year, to complete by the end of March – particularly with the hope that they would have updated guidance on infrastructure assets by then, and go into the next financial year with a clean slate. He believed that they had the resources to make this realistic, but responded to a question by the Chair that their resources issue came down to capacity, but this could not be solved until the issue of infrastructure assets had been dealt with.