Further detail

New Legislation (Appendix A)

a. Background:
• The purpose of this review was to provide management and the ARAC with assurance over the design and operational effectiveness (where applicable) of the controls in place surrounding the new legislation process. Internal audit also provided recommendations for improvements, where applicable, to the new process for implementing new legislation and legislative change.

b. Internal Audit Findings:
• BDO are able to provide limited assurance over the design of the arrangements in place. However, BDO are not able to provide assurance over the effectiveness due to the new legislation process being very new. There have been no examples of the process being completed at the time of auditing to provide evidence on the operating effectiveness of the process or robustness of the costing methodology.

• Overall, BDO found whilst the newly designed process should deliver a marked improvement in the ability to centrally co-ordinate, evaluate and cost the impact of legislation changes, there are important areas where the design of the process is not sufficiently clear, for example, the methodology for costing the required changes.

• Throughout the review, BDO identified five findings where there is an opportunity for improvement, one assessed as high and four as medium significance.

c. Summary of Findings of New Legislation:

FINDINGS ACTIONS
High 1 3
Medium 4 5
Low 0 0
Total 5 8

d. SPA Considerations:

• SPA welcomes the findings that the new process should bring improvements while also acknowledging the BDO findings identifying opportunities for further improvements. Future utilisation of the model should provide evidence that the process is effective which will be considered as part of follow up work.