CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Audit & Risk Com­mit­tee Paper | 12/06/2020

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY AUDIT & RISK COMMITTEE

FOR DECISION

Title: DRAFT INTERN­AL AUDIT PLAN ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁

Pre­pared by: CHRIS BROWN, SCOTT-MON­CRIEFF STEPHANIE HUME, SCOTT-MONCRIEFF

Pur­pose

This paper presents Scott-Moncrieff’s draft intern­al audit plan for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ for con­sid­er­a­tion by the Com­mit­tee pri­or to finalisation.

Recom­mend­a­tions

The Audit & Risk Com­mit­tee is asked to:

a) Review the pro­posed intern­al audit plan for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁; b) Sub­ject to any agreed adjust­ments, approve the intern­al audit plan for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ to form the planned basis of the Authority’s util­isa­tion of intern­al audit in the year as a resource sup­port­ing the intern­al con­trol and assur­ance frameworks.

Exec­ut­ive Summary

1. The Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity has appoin­ted Scott-Mon­crieff as intern­al aud­it­ors fol­low­ing a com­pet­it­ive tender as a pro­cure­ment col­lab­or­a­tion between a num­ber of pub­lic bod­ies. Fol­low­ing ini­tial review of the Authority’s cur­rent stra­tegic risk register and dis­cus­sion with seni­or man­agers, a draft intern­al audit plan for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ has been developed with­in the con­text of the three-year intern­al audit pro­gramme span­ning 2020 to 2023. The draft plan is presen­ted in full in Annex I to this paper.

2. The plan as draf­ted includes a high­er level of intern­al audit input than pre­vi­ous years, at 75 days com­pared with a resource deploy­ment of between 42 and 50 days in pre­vi­ous years. In dis­cus­sion with man­age­ment, two advis­ory reviews have been included in cur­rent plans cov­er­ing our man­age­ment and account­ing for out­door access infra­struc­ture (ref C.3) and in sup­port of our ongo­ing devel­op­ment and imple­ment­a­tion of our data man­age­ment prac­tices as the Author­ity rolls out imple­ment­a­tion of Cus­tom­er Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) and Elec­tron­ic Doc­u­ment and Records Man­age­ment (EDRMS) sys­tems (ref D.8). We have also sug­ges­ted the inclu­sion of a review of the Authority’s VAT status (ref A.4). Taken togeth­er, these reviews in sup­port of our devel­op­ment­al work will util­ise an estim­ated 22 days, with the remain­ing planned intern­al audit cov­er­age of 53 days.

3. Man­age­ment pro­pose to con­sider the deploy­ment of these help­ful advis­ory reviews sub­ject to the ongo­ing budget mon­it­or­ing pos­i­tion, with the expect­a­tion that some fur­ther room to sup­port such work will arise as the impacts of cur­rent COVID19 restric­tions impact on exist­ing resource deploy­ment plans.

4. The intern­al audit plan con­tin­ues to provide for the intern­al audit of our role as Account­able Body for the Cairngorms LEAD­ER Pro­gramme, as required by the Ser­vice Level Agree­ment (SLA) agreed between the Author­ity and Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment as the Man­aging Author­ity. Although there have been a num­ber of adapt­a­tions to the admin­is­trat­ive require­ments of LEAD­ER arising from COVID19 related oper­a­tion­al adjust­ments, there has been no indic­a­tion that the require­ment for intern­al audit is to be waived in 2020.

5. The Com­mit­tee is invited to review the cov­er­age of the intern­al audit plan for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ in the con­text of its intern­al con­trol and assur­ance responsibilities.

Dav­id Cameron 28 May 2020 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk

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Note: There is no Annex I included in the provided text. The page num­bers at the bot­tom of each page are also likely gen­er­ated auto­mat­ic­ally and not part of the ori­gin­al document.