On the go: The Dorset Pension Fund is still waiting to receive its audit report covering its 2020-21 period from Deloitte, in a delay that is hampering audit sign-offs in wider local government.
At a meeting of the Dorset Pension Fund committee on March 10, David Wilkes, service manager for treasury and investments, said the fund’s host authority, Dorset Council, was also awaiting its audit report for its main accounts, “which continues to be disappointing”.
“We continue to chase them on a regular basis. This problem does not relate just to Dorset and just to our auditors Deloitte, it’s across local government — not just local government pension schemes,” he said.
“I think Deloitte have got a very high number of vacancies […] that they’ve informed us of recently.”
Deloitte declined to comment.
Auditors were placed under the spotlight as part of the Redmond Review into the effectiveness of local authority audits, which in 2020 highlighted a common concern in the sector that the fee structure does not allow them to operate to a satisfactory standard.
It noted that 40 per cent of audits failed to meet their deadlines in the 2018-19 period. This “signals a serious weakness in the ability of auditors to comply with their contractual obligations”, the report stated.
The review recommended the creation of a new regulator that would work with the Financial Reporting Council. This regulator would hold auditors accountable to a new “price/quality” regime.
Aidan Dunn, executive director for corporate development at Dorset Council, told the meeting that his team was in regular contact with Deloitte regarding the audits for both the pension fund and the council itself.
He said the company is under a routine review by the Financial Reporting Council over the audit of Dorset Council’s accounts for the 2019-20 period, making the auditor “reluctant to sign off anything while they’re in that process”.
“Contact is pretty much one-way at the moment,” Dunn said, adding that Deloitte’s audit partner for Dorset had offered to appear at a committee meeting.
Councillor John Beesley, who chairs Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch’s audit and governance committee, told the meeting that the situation was “creating immense frustration for us”.
“There are two areas whereby our external auditors, Grant Thornton, are unable to sign off our 2020-21 accounts, and one of those two reasons is around Deloitte’s inability to sign off in terms of the pension fund,” he said.
