Agenda item

(To receive a report which provides an update on audit work undertaken in the period 1st January 2016 to 29th February 2016)

The Committee received a report which gave an update of audit work undertaken in the period 1 January 2016 to 29 February 2016. The Committee's attention was drawn to the 72% "actual" performance figure in the report which reflected the on-going issues with Agresso.

Officers stated that David Powell, the Council's Emergency Planning Officer, hoped to attend today's meeting to talk about business continuity but had a conflicting meeting. Officers discussed the recent malware attack on the Council's systems and that this was being analysed to produce a report on the event and lessons learned. The role of this Committee was to ensure that the Council had the necessary systems in place to respond to such attacks.

Comments by the Committee included:-

1. All of the Council's employees needed to be made aware of the contents of the report to the Executive on business continuity.

2. Could the payroll action plan be made available to the Committee?

3. Business continuity had suffered due to problems with Serco.

4. It was thought that procedures were already in place to address cyber- attacks.

Paul Briddock and Christine Shepherd from Serco, attended the meeting, and commented as follows in respect of payroll audit:-

1. Explained the procedures put in place by Serco to deal with the recent cyber-attack.

2. The payroll action plan was in place, monitored monthly and 60% of the action plan had been completed, to date.

3. Over-payments were being addressed weekly, tracked and information fed back to the cost centres.

4. Price Waterhouse Cooper had been engaged by Serco to undertake an assurance review of payroll accuracy.

Paul Briddock and Christine Shepherdresponded to comments made by the Committee as follows:-

1. The number of payroll questions by employees had reduced substantially and details of the type of questions being asked would be submitted to the next meeting of the Recovery Board.

2. The March payroll was satisfactory with only a few individual queries following its submission to HMRC.

3. The situation in connection with the schools' payroll had improved considerably since last year with few outstanding issues of a longstanding nature. Serco representatives had attended the Schools' Forum to explain the current arrangements to address queries in connection with payroll in schools and the focus in schools was now on communication. The Recovery Board would examine the statistics in due course.

4. The various contractual issues raised by the Serco contract would be examined in the future.

5. A Senior Control Officer had been appointed in September 2015 to examine the various payroll issues and work was on-going with Price Waterhouse Cooper and the County Council to ensure that the necessary controls were in place.

6. Key payroll trained staff had been retained by Mouchel which had caused issues for Serco and training on payroll issues was now provided at the University of Lincoln.

Officers stated that they still had concerns about the necessary controls being in place and there was still a low level of assurance.

RESOLVED

That the outcomes of Internal Audit work be noted.