In a report today the Public Accounts Committee says “significant
delays in publishing” the 2019-20 Whole of Government Accounts is
undermining the value of “a uniquely comprehensive view of how
government manages taxpayer’s money and of the position of public
finances”.
The pandemic exacerbated existing failures in the local audit
market, with only 45% of 2019-20 Local Government audits in
England and Wales completed by the target date and just 9% of
2020-21 audits completed by the target of September 2021. The WGA
is therefore increasingly unreliable and incomplete – excluding
23 Local Authorities altogether.
Some delays were due to the impacts of COVID-19 on finance
departments’ priorities and capacities but were made worse by the
Treasury's poor implementation of the new IT system, OSCAR II.
Delays reduce the value and transparency of information in the
WGA to the public and to decision-makers in government, and
reduces the certainty of any consequent insights, conclusions, or
decisions.
The Committee says it is critical that the Treasury “improves its
project management to meet future timetables” and calls for
enhanced reporting on key issues including the impact of
inflation on budgets, spending and pay reviews, government
emissions and climate change, fraud, and the long-term costs of
the Covid response. The Treasury should ensure commentary on key
targets, such as capital receipts on property disposals, include
current targets and proposals to keep the WGA current despite
publication delays.
In May 2022, the Government announced that it intends to cut
91,000 jobs from the civil service over the next three years – a
scale of headcount reduction that has the “potential to bring
about significant consequences for departmental service quality
and delivery”. But the Treasury admits it does not yet understand
the scale or cost of redundancies likely to be required to
achieve the reduction, what the impact on delivery of public
services might be or how to mitigate those effects.
, Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said:
“Failures in local government audit have left councils operating
in the dark, without the management information needed to make
key spending decisions in the round and balance their books. Now
we see the same picture emerging in the cross-government national
accounts.
“We still desperately need to see the big picture as the
Government balances one massive intervention after another – from
the pandemic response to the interrelated energy, climate, and
cost-of-living crises we face now and into the future. The public
also deserves a clear and transparent record of the full costs
and liabilities that generations of current and future taxpayers
have been committed to.”
