National Audit Office (United Kingdom)

National Audit Office
Agency overview
Formed 1983
Preceding agency
  • Exchequer and Audit Department
Jurisdiction Government of the United Kingdom
Motto Helping the nation spend wisely
Employees 822
Annual budget £84.6m
Agency executive
Parent department Committee of Public Accounts
Website www.nao.org.uk

The National Audit Office (NAO) is an independent Parliamentary body in the United Kingdom which is responsible for auditing central government departments, government agencies and non-departmental public bodies. The NAO also carries out Value for Money (VFM) audit into the administration of public policy.

Function

The NAO is the auditor of bodies funded directly by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

The NAO reports to the Comptroller and Auditor General who is an officer of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and in turn reports to the Public Accounts Committee, a select committee of the House of Commons. The reports produced by the NAO are reviewed by PAC and in some cases investigated further.

The NAO has two main streams of work:

Financial audit The NAO’s financial audits give assurance over three aspects of government expenditure: the truth and fairness of financial statements; the regularity (or statutory validity) of the expenditure, and; the propriety of the audited body’s conduct in accordance with parliamentary, statutory and public expectations. Financial audits are carried out in much the same way as private auditing bodies and the NAO voluntarily applies the International Standards of Auditing (ISAs). The NAO is subject to inspection by the Audit Quality Review team of the Financial Reporting Council.

Value for Money (VFM) audits are non-financial audits to measure the effectiveness, economy and efficiency of government spending. Roughly sixty of these reports are produced each year, the most notable from recent years being the reports on MRSA, which led to an increase in public interest in the topic, the report on the rescue of British Energy and the report in the Public Private Partnership to maintain the London Underground. The remits of the NAO and the Public Accounts Committee do not allow them to question the policy itself and so VFM reports only examine the implementation of policy. The responsibility for questioning policy is left for other select committees and debating chambers of Parliament, but this has not prevented the PAC being named committee of the year in 2006.

'Good Governance', an output somewhere between financial and VFM audits, was previously a strand of NAO work, but is no longer a focus of activity. The NAO does, however, publish best practice guidance for public sector organisations. An example includes the fact sheet on governance statements.

The Comptroller Function

The Comptroller Function is administered by the small, but important, Exchequer Section within the NAO.

Its work centres on recording all transactions to and from the Consolidated and National Loans funds. Money cannot be paid from either of these without the C&AG’s prior approval. This approval is granted every banking day through a mechanism known as ‘the credit’. The Exchequer Section is also responsible for agreeing payments from the Consolidated Fund directly to certain bodies, including the Queen (through the civil list), judicial salaries, MEPs salaries and the European Commission.

Parliamentary links

The NAO produces a number of briefings for select committees, but its key audience is the Public Accounts Committee. It also has a strong relationship with the Public Accounts Commission that oversees the work of the NAO and approves its budgets.

Public Accounts Committee

The NAO and Public Accounts Committee (PAC) form the key links of the Public Audit Circle which has the following sequence:

Public Accounts Commission

The Public Accounts Commission (TPAC) annually approves the NAO's corporate plans and budgets. It also receives value for money reports on the operation of the NAO. These are written by private sector audit firms in much the same manner as the NAO reports on Central Government.

International Work

The National Audit Office is a member of the International Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI). The NAO partakes in international co-operation activities between Supreme Audit Institutions (SAI), to develop technical skills and understanding of SAIs across the globe. The C&AG is also a member of the United Nations Board of Auditors. In December 2009, the General Assembly of the United Nations elected the NAO to their Board of Auditors to serve for a six-year term from 1 July 2010. The C&AG became one of three members of the UN Board responsible for auditing the United Nations itself including peacekeeping operations and related organisations such as UNICEF and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

History and establishment

The NAO developed from the former Exchequer and Audit Department (founded in 1866) in 1983 as the auditor for central government (including most of the externalised agencies and public bodies) as part of an "appropriate mechanism" to check and reinforce departmental balance and matching of quantitative allocation with qualitative purpose (as set out by public policy). The existence and work of the NAO are underpinned by three fundamental principles of public audit:[1]

The National Audit Office building, built originally as the Imperial Airways Empire Terminal. The statue, "Speed Wings over the World" is by Eric Broadbent"

The basic need for the NAO arises from these three fundamental principles, in that, as Parliament votes on public expenditure of various activities by public bodies, they need auditors that are independent of the body in question, the government and/or opposing political parties; while auditing for compliance and legal spending by departments on the activities voted for by Parliament, in a transparent and public forum.

Structure

The NAO is based in London and Newcastle and has a staff of 800.

The NAO is structured into Directorates, each with a responsibility for a government department (for instance, the Home Office or Department for Culture, Media and Sport). Each Directorate contains 20-30 staff, many of whom are qualified accountants or in training for qualification with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). Within Directorates, staff will be split between Financial Audit and Value for Money work and include staff of the following grades:

Directorates are arranged into clusters of government departments of similar characteristics. This enables the NAO to undertake comparative work between departments.

Above director grade, Directors General have responsibility for specific cross NAO functions (such as Audit Practice and Quality, and Finance and Commerce) and Executive Leaders (previously Assistant Auditors General) support the Board.

The NAO has finance, human resource and ICT functions to support its operations.

The NAO Offices

Part of the NAO's London Office is a listed building, originally built for Imperial Airways as their "Empire Terminal". The building underwent a £60m restoration and refurbishment, completed in 2009. The NAO rents part of its offices to tenants, generating income of c£1.3mn in 2012-13[2]

The building is a modern, open plan office and the refurbishment enabled the NAO to introduce many environmentally friendly features, such as rain-water harvesting.

The NAO has a separate office in Newcastle employing c90 staff.

Governance

Following the controversy over a previous C&AG’s expenses —see the criticisms— the governance arrangements of the NAO were overhauled and a Board was put in place to oversee the running of the organisation. The Board is made up of

Criticisms

Some of the criticisms that have been levelled at the NAO include the following:

Other public sector auditing bodies

There are several other public sector auditing bodies in the United Kingdom:

See also

Notes

  1. “The Audit Commission” by Couchman V. in Sherer & Turley: Current Issues in Auditing, Paul Chapman Publishing (1997)
  2. http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ANNUAL-REPORT-2013_WEB-1.pdf NAO annual report
  3. Summed up - David Walker - The Guardian, Friday 20 July 2001
  4. House of Commons Public Accounts Committee - Forty-Seventh Report
  5. Central Government's use of consultants - NAO
  6. Auditor General's luxury hotel bills under fire - The Telegraph.
  7. Parliamentary auditor hampers police inquiry into arms deal - The Guardian.

References

External links

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