Board issues response to DLUHC’s consultation on audit backlog

The SAB has issued a short response to the DLUHC consultation on "Addressing the local audit backlog in England". The consultation was discussed at the Compliance and Reporting Committee when it met on 12th February. The Committee agreed that the Board should express concern that if there were wide-spread disclaiming of LGPS administering authority accounts in order to meet the new deadlines, then there would be knock-on consequences for the 18,000 scheme employers that rely on information from the pension fund audit in order to complete their own audits. Essentially, the scheme employer auditor will need to do further work to gain assurance on the information provided it to it by the LGPS actuary on its assets and liabilities under the scheme, which well may be material, depending on a range of factors. The Board’s response also takes this opportunity to re-emphasise the representations it made in an earlier letter asking that pension fund audit should be separated out from the host authority audit. This would also resolve some of the consequential problems with backlogs as it is not the audit of the pension fund account which is usually holding up completion of the host authority’s audit report.