Chamber and committees

We are coming towards the end of the meeting. You talked about agility.

You have explained in your written report about the move towards blogs and briefings. In the past two decades, Audit Scotland has built up a powerful reputation for being authoritative and forensic, and for making evidence-led recommendations. How will you safeguard that reputation in a world of blogs and briefings? How do you see the mechanism for referring work to the committee working? Can you assure us that there will be ample opportunity for us to work with you and to scrutinise the issues that you uncover using those routes?

I turn to the main item of business, which is a chance for us to consider Audit Scotland’s strategic priorities and future work programme. I welcome our witnesses. We have with us Stephen Boyle, who is the Auditor General for Scotland, and via videolink, Mark Roberts, who is audit director at Audit Scotland.

Before I move to questions from the committee, I thank Stephen Boyle for providing a written report and ask him to give us a short presentation to outline the strategic priorities of Audit Scotland and its future work programme.

We have identified the need for follow-up instead of just having a one-day inquiry into an organisation’s performance before everyone moves on, and we are keen to work with you to ensure that we are regularly updated on progress that is being made.

We move to questions from Craig Hoy.

Yes. I was going to say that we should build that issue into our work programme and return to it, because it is clearly a matter of concern and interest. Auditor General, is there a register of public bodies in Scotland that take part, or that do not take part, in the national fraud initiative?

Thank you. That was a very helpful introduction to this morning’s session.

I will begin by reflecting on some of the lessons from the previous session. This is a new committee, but we need to understand where there are underlying issues of which we need to keep fully abreast. In looking at the legacy report of the previous committee, it struck me that it identified recurring themes that seemed to be common in instances in which organisations had not met the performance standards that were expected, or where something more fundamental had gone wrong. The previous committee spoke of

“leadership challenges, poor workforce planning, weak governance arrangements”

and failures—which were sometimes catastrophic—with information and communications technology projects. The committee also reflected on the absence of key data and the failure to properly measure outcomes.

Will you explain how you plan to keep abreast of those themes, and how you expect to be able to continue to explore them in the future work programme?

I think that some of us are maybe more concerned about whether people can access their general practitioner and what their sense of that service is, has been and might be in the future. I think Craig Hoy wants to come in with a brief question that is related to this area.

I do not have an declarable interests. However, I draw the commission’s attention to my voluntary entry in the register of members’ interests.

One of the things that struck me from the report was on page 20, on internal and external quality assurance review. The conclusion that was drawn that

“only four of the 11 financial audits we reviewed achieved our target standard of quality. Of the remainder, three were graded ‘improvements required’ and four were graded ‘significant improvements required’”.

The commentary also refers to “mixed results”. Will you give us more details of those mixed results? What are the particular areas for improvement, what is their seriousness, and what is the work plan to address them?

I am sure that we will come back to that and keep an eye on it.

I am sorry to dwell more on the negative than on the positive, but the other area of the annual report that struck me was the section a couple of pages later that refers to professional training for audit and included the pass-rate statistics. In 2018-19, the pass rate was 85.7 per cent; in 2019-20 it was down to 84 per cent; in 2020-21 it had gone down to 79 per cent. I think there was a previous suggestion that the variation might have been due to the introduction of a new exam a couple of years ago. Why is the pattern like that? What are you doing to address it? Do you have insight into why the pattern has been going in that direction?

The next item that we have to consider is the legacy paper, which was circulated in advance of the meeting.

I place on record our thanks to the session 5 Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee for its legacy report. I am conscious of the fact that two members of the committee in this session were members of that committee and that they played a part in putting together the legacy paper. It is clear that the legacy paper will be an important part of the consideration that we need to give to our work programme.

I invite any member of the committee who has any comments on, or who wishes to add anything in connection with, the legacy paper to indicate that they want to speak.