Internal auditors at Bristol City Council are having to battle staff who “push back” against their efforts to scrutinise how the local authority operates.
Local authorities have a statutory duty to conduct internal audits to assess how well they govern themselves and run their operations.
But internal auditors at Bristol City Council have deferred audits at the request of senior directors and have had their efforts hampered by uncooperative managers.
The council’s deputy chief internal auditor, Melanie Henchy-McCarthy, revealed the difficulties when quizzed by the local authority’s audit committee on Tuesday (May 28).
She said her team had experienced “some restriction” on the scope of their work during 2018/19.
“Some senior directors didn’t want us to do a number of audits,” she explained.
But there were valid reasons for deferring those audits and it hadn’t affected her team’s ability to form an “evidenced audit opinion”, Ms Henchy-McCarthy said.
That opinion was that there has been “minimal improvement in the control environment” at the council over the past three years, the latest internal audit report shows.
“There remains a need for greater management buy-in to the control environment and the internal audit process, in order to achieve further improvement,” the report for the year to March 2019 states.
UK Public Sector Internal Audit Standards define the control environment as "the attitude and actions of the board and management regarding the importance of control within the organisation".
Ms Henchy-McCarthy explained that while council directors saw the value in internal audits, that message was not necessarily “dropping down” to management level.
“So we are still getting push back with regard to audits,” she said.
Internal auditors would be able to do more and better audits if they were not having to waste time negotiating with managers over getting the necessary information, she added.
“We’re not getting the level of engagement that we need,” she said. “We’re not getting, necessarily, the information that we require at that time.
“We could do more audits if we were not having to extend the time of audit because of the need to negotiate access and information provision.”
Ms Henchy-McCarthy said work was underway to change managers’ perceptions of internal audits as “a positive thing and not a negative thing” but that cultural change was also needed.
“A professional, independent and objective internal audit service is one of the key elements of good governance,” according to UK Public Sector Internal Audit Standards.
