Procurement and Contract Audit Forum
Current Initiatives
Sharing of audit plans
If an auditor was about to carry out an audit of, say, highways maintenance, wouldn’t it be useful for them to know that someone at another organisation was about to undertake a similar review in their area? They could share ideas, swap notes and compare the results of their reviews. Would it be useful for that auditor to also be able to contact someone who has just completed a similar review?
Even better, wouldn’t it be useful if auditors from several organisations were able to talk to each other, compare their programmes and discuss their results? The Forum is currently looking at ways it could facilitate this as it feels this could have a major impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of audit work across the country.
Sharing of audit programmes
Organisations throughout the UK carry out similar reviews of procurement and contracts, so why not have a set of standard audit programmes? These could be used as a basis for audit work and prevent numerous wheels from being reinvented.
The Forum has started by producing a set of five high-level audit programmes and aims to move on and produce programmes for all key subjects.
Ensuring audit plans consider procurement risks
Annual audit plans should focus on the key risks facing the organisation. The Forum aims to provide guidance on how such plans should accommodate those risks that are related to procurement issues and is first seeking information from organisations of the audits that are included in current annual audit plan (both those of a contractual nature and those that are not) and details of how the decisions were taken to include these tasks rather than any others.
Raising awarness to the risk of procurement and contract related fraud
The Forum wishes to help Heads of Audit provide assurance in this area and is currently considering how it can obtain information (suitably anonymised) regarding the scale and nature of contract related irregularities.
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