The assessment process will allow authorities to assess and understand the organisation’s performance against recognised good practice and to benchmark against other organisations. They will also be able to track progress and generate evaluation reports showing performance against the code of practice.
Councils are required to prepare an annual governance statement by the end of September, which should include an evaluation of the adequacy of an authority’s counter fraud arrangements. The assessment tool ha been developed alongside CIPFA’s Code of Practice on Managing the Risk of Fraud and Corruption.
Julie Sharp, chief auditor at the London Borough of Redbridge who trialled the new tool, said the tool would help organisations understand the requirements of the CIPFA code and its implementation.
“In addition to that, the tool kit is easy to use and capable of generating high quality reports both in visual form and written which we found to be very useful for the purposes of reporting to various stakeholders within the authority,” she said.
Rachael Tiffen, head of Counter Fraud Centre and governance at CIPFA, added that evaluation of a local authority’s counter fraud and anti-corruption was vital.
“Providing tools that enable local authorities to do this effectively empowers internal auditors to report accurately, and importantly to identify what actions need to be taken to improve,” she added.
The assessment tool is available to purchase via the CIPFA website.