22 Mar 2024
District council bosses are remaining tight-lipped over what progress has been made on the much-delayed external audit of 20/21 accounts.
At a recent meeting of SADC’s audit and governance committee, the work is listed on the audit work programme calendar as “unallocated”, although it was later suggested it could be completed by the end of September.
As we are now fast approaching the end of the 2023/24 financial year, it appears that SADC will be yet another year behind when it comes to these particular accounts.
Asked to clarify the current situation, we were steered back to the report to the committee made back in September explaining the issues.
At the time external auditors BDO said they had identified material misstatements that will “require restatement of the 2019/20 financial statements and corrections to the 2020/21 financial statements”.
These included a £5.7 million overvaluation of the council’s land which indicates there may be a “material error” in the council’s land and building valuation, with large uplifts in net income used in valuations suggesting that the prior year net income had not been updated for some years and may have been incorrect, plus “material misstatements” which could require restatement of the 2019/20 and 2020/21 financial statements.
The auditor identified serious errors in the council’s reported cash position, for example, £1.4 million was omitted from the 2020/21 figures. An “unexplained” £0.7 million difference in a bank reconciliation was also highlighted.
It was also recorded that the council was initially unable to provide a reconciliation of the £0.9m VAT recoverable balance to agree to HMRC submissions as most of the supporting information had been “mislaid” by a previous member of staff and an adjusting return had to be subsequently submitted due to errors in the initial return.
Suzanne Jones, SADC strategic director for customer, business and corporate support, promised that they were working towards a final resolution to the points made.
But since then the council has appointed a new external auditor in the form of KPMG, which set a deadline for the approval of current accounts as October/November, and all outstanding audited accounts up to and including 2022/23 to be published at the end of September.
A presentation from the company told councillors: “Due to the current levels of uncertainty there is an increased likelihood of significant risks emerging throughout the audit cycle that are not identified (or in existence) at the time we planned our audit.”
At this time, SADC has refused to answer any further questions on the accounts raised by the St Albans Times, but James Spencer, Conservative Parliamentary candidate for St Albans, said: “The financial disaster facing St Albans is a mess of the Lib Dem council’s own making, and what we are seeing from the external auditor shows as much. It is another symptom of an unaccountable council which is in desperate need of a stronger opposition.”
