CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Audit & Risk Com­mit­tee Paper 2 03/05/18

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY AUDIT & RISK COMMITTEE

FOR DECISION

Title: INTERN­AL AUDIT REVIEW: AUDIT RECOM­MEND­A­TIONS FOL­LOW UP

Pre­pared by: CLAIRE ROBERTSON, BDO

Pur­pose

This paper presents BDO’s intern­al audit review of the Authority’s pro­gress in imple­ment­ing agreed actions in response to pre­vi­ous audit recommendations.

Recom­mend­a­tions

The Audit & Risk Com­mit­tee is asked to:

a) Con­sider the intern­al auditor’s find­ings on the Authority’s pro­gress in imple­ment­ing actions to address pre­vi­ous audit recom­mend­a­tions; b) Endorse the man­age­ment responses to actions which remain to be imple­men­ted or are cur­rently par­tially implemented.

Exec­ut­ive Summary

1. The Park Authority’s intern­al aud­it­ors, BDO, have under­taken a review of the Authority’s pro­gress in imple­ment­ing actions to address pre­vi­ous audit recom­mend­a­tions. The full report of the review is attached at Annex I to this paper.

2. The review cov­ers 43 recom­mend­a­tions raised across 19 audit reviews. The review high­lights that, of these 43 recom­mend­a­tions 17 (40%) have been fully imple­men­ted, a fur­ther 8 (19%) have either been par­tially imple­men­ted or super­seded while 11 (26%) are not yet due for imple­ment­a­tion accord­ing to sched­ules for action estab­lished by man­age­ment and agreed by the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee. A total of 7 (16%) of recom­mend­a­tions for action to improve con­trols have not had action taken on them with­in planned timetable. Of the recom­mend­a­tions where action has yet to be taken, 2 actions are graded as ​“amber” or medi­um status while the remain­ing 5 are ​“green” or rel­at­ively low risk status.

3. Over a year where the Euro­parc Con­fer­ence was in plan­ning and delivered, staff trans­ferred into the new office exten­sion, and sig­ni­fic­ant pro­jects such as the Cus­tom­er Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment sys­tem were pro­cured and ini­ti­ated, it is reas­sur­ing that man­age­ment and staff teams con­tin­ued to act on recom­men­ded con­trol improve­ments with full or par­tial action taken on 78% of the actions sched­uled over the period.

4. The Man­age­ment Team remain aware of those areas of action not yet addressed. While there is some reas­sur­ance that the major­ity of these recom­mend­a­tions are low risk and rel­at­ively minor con­trol improve­ments, we will ensure that appro­pri­ate resource and pri­or­ity is giv­en to address­ing these remain­ing issues with­in the reviewed timetable sug­ges­ted in the man­age­ment updates included in Annex I.

Dav­id Cameron 30 April 2018 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk