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Governance does matter, say seminar attendees

Over 30 delegates attended this excellent event in March, kindly hosted by Genesis Housing Group in London.

Neil Tyson of GNT Fraud solution looked at Fraud in the context of partnership and trust’ and suggested internal audit teams might get involved with these at the early stages before contracts were finalised. This was followed by a discussion forum on what Internal Audit might do about rumours that a contract manager might be too close to the partner organisation. It was agreed that it might be difficult to substantiate such an allegation: investigation options might include email and telephone review (subject to privacy laws) and use of specialist organisations. Asking the staff member and those they worked with were other options considered.

Shonali Routray of Public concern at work gave us a quick tour of whistleblowing, and reminded us of the need to make sure all our staff are aware of the policy and also recommended that we look at whether our whistleblowing policies are in accordance with the BSI Code of Practice.

Arthur Merchant of Grant Thornton asked, ‘Where were the auditors when it all went pear shaped?’ Amongst other things, he suggested that a place we did not want to be was making significant numbers of high priority recommendations that the Board considered to be in trivial areas. Arthur considered reviews of corporate governance and risk management to be essential to ensure good governance; as failure in this area appears to be a common theme for all housing associations that have been put into supervision (or worse); and that auditors need to be very familiar with how the organisation is performing through keeping on top of management accounts and performance against non financial targets, so that they can spot the early signs of things going wrong. 

Finally, there was a change of emphasis when David Timms of KPMG looked into a recent survey about IT investment. A show of hands in the room indicated that internal auditors agreed that IT investment was not always as effective as it could be.

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