Issue - meetings

To consider the report of the Interim Internal Audit Manager.

The Interim Internal Audit Manager explained that this report was to show progress to the committee and also to consider a possible change to the structure of the database. The officer informed the committee that there had been 1253 entries from 2013 with 526 open or unresolved. Following a review of the existing processes, a number of these recommendations were closed off as they were completed or no longer required, leaving 322 open recommendations. Only 35 of these related to the 2013 to 2018 period and were historic and not particularly important to the current day. The officer was seeking approval to remove these from the database into another system to be tracked separately from the current recommendations.

In response to a question surrounding high risk entries and whether any were included in the total, the officer confirmed that there were high risk items. The committee considered the entries and asked that EY Auditors to be consulted before an action was taken. The committee also asked if the recommendations from before 2017/18 were removed, what would happen to the high risk items in relation to their monitoring. The officer explained that while they would be removed from the database, they would be kept in an audit folder and would be monitored by staff in its new stored location.

A question was asked whether anything could be lost or forgotten following a transfer of files to a new database. The officer explained that they were confident it could be monitored, and whilst there was always some risk involved the changes would allow the existing tracking system to be monitored more effectively going forwards.

RESOLVED: to:

a.     note the report

b.     seek further guidance from EY auditors to validate their perspective of the outstanding recommendations

c.     bring the report back to the committee for approval