Financial accounts for Hampshire County Council will not be given a proper audit opinion due to a national backlog.
The council’s account for 2022/23 will not be completed due to the impact of the national audit backlog, which means the external auditor will “disclaim” them.
Having published unaudited draft accounts for 2022/23 on May 2023, the council’s audit committee then approved them in September.
After that, the council published a notice on its website saying that it had not been possible to publish audited accounts by the September 30 deadline.
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Now, the county council has confirmed that the audit for 2022/23 will not be completed.
This means that the external auditor, Ernst and Young LLP, will issue a “disclaimer” opinion, in line with the government’s intentions to implement a backstop date of December 13, 2024, for outstanding audits for 2022/23.
Ideally, auditors should issue a “clean” opinion on accounts, thereby providing full assurance as to their content and accuracy.
But they can also issue a modified opinion or simply disclaim accounts, where they do not provide any opinion related to the financial statements.
The council said this was because of the national backlog rather than any other “material issue” about the accounts.
Nationally, the government anticipates hundreds of modified or disclaimed audit opinions where auditors cannot complete audits before the backstop date.
Hampshire County Council said work has been done on the 2023/24 audit; however, it has not yet been completed.
Although this should have been by September 30, Ernst and Young LLP intends to complete it by January 2025. The government’s backstop date for 2023/24 audits will be February 28, 2025.
Last year, the House of Commons public accounts committee called on ministers to “urgently” address the audit backlog after finding that just 12 per cent of public body audits were completed on time in 2022.
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) said the number of audited accounts still outstanding peaked at 918 in September last year and stood at 771 at the end of 2023.
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