Over the three years since its formation, the Trust has improved its arrangements for closedown and production of the financial statements each year. This has been reflected in year-on-year increases in its auditors' local evaluation scores for Key Line of Enquiry 1.1 Financial Reporting and achieving Level 4 in 2008/09.
In December 2008, the Trust met with its auditors a number of times to discuss and agree a detailed plan for the audit of the 2008/09 financial statements. This included detailed discussions and agreement about the benefits and pitfalls of undertaking audit work on various elements of the month 9 submission to the Department of Health to:
- provide audit assurance for the year end
- reduce the pressure on both the Trust and the auditors for the audit of the year end statements
- meet the deadline of presenting the audited statements to the Audit Committee on 21 May (only four weeks after production of the draft statements)
The agreed plan included a detailed timeline starting in January and ending in the sign off of financial statements, which included agreed dates when working papers would be available throughout February, March and April.
Working papers produced to support the financial statements were of a high quality. Each had a lead schedule to provide clear links between entries in the financial statements and detailed supporting analyses. This meant that very few queries were raised by the audit team.
During 2008/09 the Trust scanned its invoices and as part of the closedown process, the finance team discovered it was possible to include an electronic hyperlink to scanned invoices in downloads from the General Ledger. This meant that during preparation of the financial statements and the audit, supporting documentation could be quickly and easily accessed via the hyperlink. This saved significant amounts of time for both finance staff and auditors in locating paper documents.
The outcome of the arrangements put in place by the Trust and the ongoing liaison with its auditors, was that the year end financial statements audit ran smoothly and the Audit Committee considered the audited financial statements and the Auditors Annual Governance Report on 21 May. This allowed the Trust's finance staff to spend the rest of May and June concentrating on the new financial year.