Audit Panel

Minutes of the Meeting held on 1 November 2011

Time Commenced: 2.00pm   Time Terminated: 2.40pm

Present:

Councillor Ricci (Chair)
Councillors Baines, Fairfoull, J. Fitzpatrick, P. Harrison, Miah, Sidebottom and Whitehead.

14. Declarations Of Interest

There were no declarations of interest to report at this meeting.

15. Minutes

The Minutes of the meeting of the Audit Panel held on 31 May 2011 were signed as a correct record.

16. Progress Report on Risk Management and Internal Audit Activities – April to September 2011 

Consideration was given to a report of the Head of Risk Management and Audit Services detailing the work undertaken by the Risk Management and Internal Audit Service between April and September 2011.

She reported on the following areas of work undertaken by Risk Management and Insurance as follows:- 

• Risk Management – the priorities for 2011-12 were as follows:
  • To implement and embed the Information Risk Management Framework across the Council in accordance with the Information Risk Policy;
  • To assist services to re-evaluate their business continuity plans in relation to the new structure and service reviews. This would also involve updating the corporate and directorate plans and the deliver of a BCP exercise to test the plans in place;
  • To participate in the AGMA Collaborative Insurance initiative; and
  • To support managers to assess their risks as service review were undertaken and to ensure that changes to systems and procedures remain robust and resilient to that claims for compensation could be defended.

 With regard to Internal Audit, she referred to the Internal Audit Plan which had been approved in May 2011 and covered the period April 2011 to March 2012 (Table 1 detailed an update on progress against the plan). She stated that 42% of the audit plan had been achieved so far. This was in line with expectations as annual leave was higher in the first half of the year. In addition to this there had been a vacancy in the Team which had not been filled until August 2011. 

Reference was made to the number of final reports issued in relation to systems, risk and managed audits, 18 and 2 school audits had been undertaken during the first half of the year, with the results summarised in Table 3. 

Details were given of the work undertaken in the following areas:-

• Internal Audit Benchmarking
• Review of Internal Audit;
• Annual Governance Statement;
• Irregularities/Counter Fraud Work; and
• National Anti-Fraud Network.

Resolved
That the report and the performance of the Service Unit for the period April to September 2011 be noted.

17. Urgent Items

The Chair reported that there were no urgent items for consideration at this meeting.

Chair