Finance

The National Audit Office (NAO) will “start doing comparative reports of similar activities in departments” from next year, comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse has said.

The Home Office has outsourced its payments processing to NS&I, the state-owned savings bank, it was announced earlier this month.

Treasury permanent secretary Nick Macpherson has called on government departments to improve their institutional memory.

The efforts of Companies House (CH) to tackle fraud should be based on “strengthening the current model rather than radically changing company law”, its chief executive has told CSW, to ensure that anti-fraud work doesn’t weaken transparency in business information or create additional burdens on business.

Reforms overseen by the Cabinet Office’s Efficiency and Reform Group (ERG) have generated £10bn savings in the last financial year, ministers have today announced.

Parliament and government should agree a Code of Legislative Standards to improve the quality of laws produced at Westminster, according to a report published yesterday by the Political and Constitutional Reform committee.

Companies run by two lead departmental non-executive directors (Neds) have been publicly accused of serious wrongdoing.

The government needs a chief financial officer (CFO) “who is clearly and visibly responsible for ensuring that spending decisions are made on the basis of financial analysis and for measuring the outcomes in terms of value for money and performance management,” Rebecca McCaffry, innovation specialist at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), has told CSW.

The annual drama of the Budget is a dysfunctional relic and should be scrapped, says Julian McCrae. Ministers and civil servants have bigger – and more nourishing – fish to fry.

The civil service pay cap will continue for an extra year, limiting pay increases to an average of one per cent per year until 2015-16, and the government will also seek to end automatic pay rises for all civil servants, chancellor George Osborne announced in his Budget last week.

The collapse of the West Coast Mainline franchising process won’t deter the Department for Transport (DfT) from taking necessary risks, the department’s permanent secretary has promised in an interview with CSW.

Four areas piloting ‘Whole Place’ community budgets will produce estimated public spending savings of over £200 million a year between them over the next five years.

The government has signed an agreement with private-sector partner arvato to manage an independently-run shared service centre, which will run back-office transactions to government departments. The move is intended to create savings of up to £600m a year over seven years.

Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the Treasury permanent secretary, last week praised the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the National Audit Office (NAO) for their work in holding departments to account despite the “discomfort” of his fellow permanent secretaries.

Finance professionals believe that the senior management teams of their organisations have a “deep understanding” or are “aware of the importance” of the finance function, a CSW survey has found.

Most Whitehall departments will have to move their transaction services – meaning HR, payroll, and accounts processes – into a shared service project by 2014, according to the Cabinet Office’s shared services strategy, published in December.

The Ministry of Defence is struggling to build a financial management system that determines a “single version of the financial truth” and there is a “high risk to delivery” of the department’s strategy for setting out clear management information (MI), according to the Defence Review Annual Report published yesterday by Lord Levene.

A further £22bn in spending cuts or tax rises will be required in the period of the next spending review to 2017-18 if the government is to achieve its goal of eradicating the structural deficit, new analysis says.

“Irregular” voluntary redundancy payments made by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to its former chief executive officer Phillippa Williamson have led the National Audit Office (NAO) to qualify its audit opinion on the SFO’s 2011-12 accounts.

“Irregular” voluntary redundancy payments made by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to its former chief executive officer Phillippa Williamson have led the National Audit Office (NAO) to qualify its audit opinion on the SFO’s 2011-12 accounts.