Finance

The National Audit Office may need additional resources to carry out investigations into “distributed services” in the health and education sectors, according to its comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse. With the creation of academies and clinical commissioning groups, for example, the number of service providers accountable to Parliament is growing fast.

Departments must stop using commercial confidentiality as a reason for withholding information about contracts, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said in a report published today.

Poor financial forecasting is an “entrenched” problem in the civil service, and leads to money being wasted across departments, the National Audit Office has said.

The Serious Fraud Office has asked for emergency funding of £19m to pay for higher than expected expenditure on a series of big investigations.

At least 2% of the government’s benefits expenditure has been taken up by fraud and error since 2005, according to new figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

A total of £12bn should be cut from the welfare bill in the first two years of next Parliament, in order to spare government departments from “even faster cuts”, chancellor George Osborne has announced today.

Sharon White, currently director general for public services, has been appointed as the second permanent secretary at HM Treasury.

One of the architects of the Freedom of Information Act has told Civil Service World that this “very radical policy” is “capable of being expensive and burdensome”, and suggested that the rules governing disclosure require departments to make very complex – and thus expensive – decisions.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has requested flexibility to improve the pay of top staff in order to compete with the private sector, senior officials told two hearings of the Commons’ Defence Committee in the last week.

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.