Financial Audit

The vision of the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) is to provide independence and excellence in audit to improve public services and its purpose is to make sure public money is spent properly. The NIAO intends to procure a number of financial audit services to support the high-quality delivery of our portfolio of financial audits. We intend to provide these services through a procurement exercise which will be launched in early 2026. We plan to contract out these audits through a lot based structure. For audit engagements under the contract, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) or the Local Government Auditor (LGA) will retain overall responsibility for signing the audit opinion. Audits will need to be carried out to internationally recognised auditing standards but also adapted to the public sector reporting framework, which includes the Government Financial Reporting Manual for central government bodies and Code of Practice on Local Authority Accounting in the United Kingdom for local government audits. Central government work also includes ensuring that transactions have been applied to the purposes intended by the Assembly and conform to the authorities which govern them (regularity). We anticipate that the contract term will be for a minimum initial period of 3 years with an option to extend by two further periods of one year each.