UK public sector accounts qualified by audit office

(CNS): While civil servants in the Cayman Islands are still struggling to produce any meaningful public accounts, auditors in the UK have also qualified the whole of the British government accounts for the second consecutive year. According to a report on Public Finance, a specialist news website, the qualification was due to ‘significant issues’ with the quality and consistency of the data used in the financial statements.  The accounts have also been published quite late with the 2010/11 financial year end accounts coming out more than a year and a half after the period they refer to.

The 2010/11 Whole Government Accounts were published last week and the UK’s National Audit Office qualified the accounts on six grounds, including the valuation basis used for local authority infrastructure assets, the quality and consistency of the data provided by the health and education sectors among other issues.

The accounts were also late as they were completed 19 months after the end of the financial year. Experts in the UK advised that faster production of figures would allow the WGA to be more widely used for financial planning in Whitehall.

While the UK public sector bean counters may also be struggling with the timeliness and quality of accounts, the UK has a far larger and more complex public sector than Cayman and despite being over a year late, by comparison at this stage Cayman is now eight years late with its entire public sector accounts or the EPS which is equivalent to the UK’s WGA.

In addition, although the UK accounts were qualified, the Cayman Islands has in some cases not even reached the point where the accounts can actually be properly audited and when the Cayman government’s entire accounts for 2010/11 accounts are finally published the auditor general will be issuing a disclaimer whichmeans that nothing in the accounts or reports can be relied upon.

See article on UK government accounts here