We will........

We need.......

Planning

Contact the responsible or nominated officer(s) to agree the most appropriate timing for the individual audit to take place.

Produce Terms of Reference and scope that are agreed with you. The Terms of Reference will reflect the key issues of financial and operational risk for your area that is being reviewed.

Planning

A response to the request for the appropriate timing of the audit. This will help us ensure that our work is carried out at a convenient time of the year for you and your area. This will also help us co-ordinate our work with other review agencies inside and outside of the institution.

You to make some time available to help us plan and scope the audit assignment. We will contact you to arrange the planning meeting at least a week before the start of the audit but usually around two weeks before.

To know if there are any areas of significance or concern as this may affect our planning or approach. We will also need to be kept informed of any factors that may impede us completing our work or may affect us meeting our agreed deadline dates.

Fieldwork

Provide a professional and independent service through adherence to professional audit standards and membership of professional bodies and networks.

Carry out our work to meet the agreed terms of reference / scope. Any variation from this, will be jointly agreed before any of this additional work takes place.

Endeavour to work in a way that causes minimal disruption to your work environment during our audit.

Provide you with on-going feedback and progress reporting during the audit review - areas of significant concern will usually be raised before the formal audit feedback starts.

Keep you informed of the likely impact and revise the appropriate dates, where further work is required which may affect the timing of our reporting and feedback.

Fieldwork

Access to staff, records and assets during our assignment - we may need to take copies of some documents - where possible these will be identified in advance of the audit review starting.

You to identify key staff that we need access to in advance of us starting our work.

Depending upon the nature of the work we carry out, somewhere to work - we will discuss the practicalities of this with you at our planning meeting.

Reporting

Produce balanced and practical audit reports with recommendations that are practical, supported and justified within the report. We will also ensure that anything we recommend contributes to the achievement of the institution's and your own area's objectives.

Report to you in a timely manner.
Respect the need for privacy or confidentiality.

Provide you with an opinion that gives assurance or otherwise on the areas that have been reviewed.

Report the progress of our work (including any fundamental recommendations) to each meeting of the institution’s Audit Committee.

Reporting

A timely response to our draft audit report so that it can be progressed to the stage of an agreed final report as quickly as possible. We usually ask that you respond to us within ten working days of the draft being received.

You to complete the action plan produced as part of the draft report and identify any nominated officers with practical and reasonable time scales for implementation of recommendations.

You to complete our post-audit questionnaire that is dispatched along with the final report. We use this as a basis for identifying improvements to our service.