Agenda item

Report by Chief Internal Auditor

The Committee considered a report which provided executive summaries and details on eight audits that had been undertaken by Internal Audit and the recommendations that had been identified as a result of these audits.

Economic Development Officers provided background detail to the CHORD programme, from its remit to lessons learned, problems encountered and the steps undertaken to resolve these.

The Committee was reassured that at each Area Committee meeting, an Economic Development Officer, project manager or programme manager was present to help ensure that the Committee acted as a project board at local level.

External Auditors expressed their concern at the number of issues identified in the report with the CHORD programme.  It was acknowledged that these were mostly historical, but that they would be looking at actions being taken by the Council to resolve these.

Discussion then took place on the issues surrounding Winter Maintenance, the procedures in place for informing the public of any road closures or route problems outside of core “office hours”, the use of “RALF”, satellite navigation systems on winter maintenance vehicles, the list of contractors to call on to meet statutory obligations and also the planned review to bring down maintenance costs to be more in line with the budget.

Decision

The Committee noted;

(i)            the contents of the report and detail within each individual report in respect of the following audits;

·         CHORD

·         Communications

·         Flood Risk Control

·         Fostering and Adoption

·         HomeCare – Contract Monitoring

·         Records Management Plan/ Information Security

·         Revenue & Benefits – Council Tax discount

·         Winter Maintenance;

(ii)           the concerns of the External Auditors regarding the issues identified within the CHORD programme; and

(iii)          that in 2014/15 External Audit would be monitoring the Oban CHORD project in part.

(Reference: Report by Chief Internal Auditor dated 13 March 2015, submitted)