Five NI department accounts qualified

6 Nov 12
More than a quarter of Northern Ireland government departments failed to file a clean set of accounts last year, the auditor general has revealed.
By Vivienne Russell | 6 November 2012

More than a quarter of Northern Ireland government departments failed to file a clean set of accounts last year, the auditor general has revealed.

In his annual report on public sector financial auditing and reporting in Northern Ireland, Kieran Donnelly noted that five of the 19 departmental resource accounts for 2011/12 received qualified audit opinions. The departments were: Agriculture & Rural Development; Culture, Arts & Leisure; Education; Social Development; and the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister.

Twenty-one other public bodies also had their accounts qualified, including the Northern Ireland Prison Service, the Northern Ireland Library Authority and Ilex Urban Regeneration Company. The report excludes bodies in the health and social care sector, whose accounts are reported on separately.

Donnelly said that standards of financial reporting continued ‘to remain high’ but in the past two years there had been ‘an increasing failure to comply with instructions from governing authorities, including a failure to obtain Department for Finance & Personnel expenditure approvals’.

For example, the OFMDFM continued to spend £1.6m on decontamination work at the Maze/Long Kesh prison in 2011/12 despite approval for the entire project being rescinded by the DFP the previous year. The department also spent a further £4.6m on developing the Ebrington Parade Ground although a change to the scope of the project had not been approved by the DFP. In both these cases, the breach of approvals occurred first during 2010/11 and had previously been reported by the auditor general.

Donnelly also highlighted the number of audited bodies that had decided to award salary increases without first obtaining permission from either the DFP or their sponsoring department.

In a separate section, the report reviewed progress public sector bodies were making towards prompt payment of invoices. Central government had improved its performance, paying 89% of invoices within ten days in 2011/12, up from 81% the previous year. However, health and education bodies lagged significantly behind. Health and social care trusts managed to pay only 48% of invoices within ten days, while the performance of education and library boards deteriorated slightly, with prompt payment rates slipping from 52% in 2010/11 to 51% in 2011/12.

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