Issue - meetings

To receive a report from the Internal Audit Team Leader updating the Committee on the work performed by Internal Audit for the 2015/16 financial year.

The Committee had before it, and NOTED, a report * from the Internal Audit Team Leader updating it on the work performed by Internal Audit for the 2015/16 financial year. It was explained that the timetable had been changed slightly due to the fact that the internal audit team had had to do some work towards the financial year end and as a result some of the smaller audits had been moved into the audit plan for the following year. However, all core audits would be completed by 31 March 2016.

Discussion regarding internal audit reports took place under for each audit included in the report:

ICT Core

The Chairman stated that he was concerned that out of the 20 publicised ICT policies on Sharepoint only 7 were up to date at the time of the audit including information security. In addition the recommendation regarding this had been brought forward from 2012/13. The Internal Audit Team Leader explained that ICT had a rolling programme, with different policies falling out of date at different times. They were however, constantly reviewing them.

ICT had accepted a poor external assessment of the website while it was under development and had further accepted that they were not going to achieve 4 star quality in 2015, however, there were other measures of website accessibility to aspire to and the website had very recently undergone some improvement ensuring improved navigation.

Trade Waste

It was explained that the table in section 3.2.8 of the report needed to be amended to show that there were currently no high risks in this area.

Freedom of Information

It was explained that there were certain data sets which Government guidelines stated needed to be published, for example, the Constitution needed to be updated on an annual basis.

Appraisals & Training

The Chairman queried why non-attendance at a training course could not be reported the next day thereby allowing the costs involved to be ascertained at an earlier stage. It was explained that training was not currently accounted for in this way and that analysing the costs was linked to budget setting hence why the target date for completion had been set at 30 June 2016 rather than sooner.

It was confirmed that non-attendance costs would be charged to the specific areas concerned rather than across the attendees.

The Chairman referred the Committee to the list of recommendations shown at Appendix 1 which clearly showed the number of high, medium and low recommendations outstanding. He had concerns regarding the number of overdue medium recommendations and the length of time they had been outstanding, some since 2012/13. It was AGREED that the Chairman write to the Chief Executive, voicing the concerns of the Committee and requesting that he ask Management Team to give their attention to this matter.

Note: * Report previously circulated; copy attached to the signed minutes.