CPU1763 - Audit of Payments

Leicestershire County Council and Nottingham City Council formed a partnership in 2010 to deliver HR, payroll and finance transactional shared services. The shared service aims to provide a sustainable solution to deliver more efficient, cost effective services and a technical platform from which new ways of working can continually be developed and delivered. EMSS brings a more customer centric way of working, it adopts a more efficient approach to delivering services and by sharing the knowledge and investment, the risk of failure to each council is minimised. It is also designed to make these benefits and opportunities available to other public sector organisations to share across a wider base the financial gains that the partnership has enjoyed. Founded in a major transformational programme, EMSS enabled both councils to respond to the challenging financial and political landscape for local government, as well as the public?s expectation to deliver services that are of high quality and value for money and will enable both councils being in a stronger position to protect frontline services. In April 2015 a review of processes and procedures within the Finance Service Centre was undertaken. This focussed initially on Accounts Payable and identified several areas where improvements could be made both short and long term. It was then decided to investigate further the opportunity to implement these improvements and conduct, for the first time, a retrospective audit of the accounts payable function from EMSS go live date April 2013 to March 2016 with the aim to recover any monies owing to the relevant partners. At the same time it was recognised that a proactive approach was required to minimise the risk of future duplicate and erroneous payments by the purchase of preventative audit software.