The mayor requested that QAO conduct a forensic audit investigating Ipswich City Council’s financial practices, including those of wholly owned entities, from the 2009–10 financial year to the former council’s dismissal in 2018.
The mayor further requested that QAO conduct the audit at arm’s length from council and make its findings publicly available for the community to scrutinise.
We responded to the mayor on 5 December 2022.
We advised the mayor that we would not be conducting the requested audit.
We considered the significant time and cost that the nature and extent of the requested audit would require. We concluded that conducting the audit would not result in any new findings or recommendations where the value would outweigh the cost of the audit.
While the request for audit included general references to financial management practices and discrepancies in monies claimed and paid to former councillors and senior council officers, no specific matters were identified. We advised the mayor that if she wished to raise specific allegations for QAO to investigate, we would further consider if these were matters we could audit.
In reaching our conclusion we considered:
- the length of time covered in the request and the relevance of matters at that time to the current operations of the council
- the fact we previously conducted audits of these matters through our annual audits of the entities and reported on the results of our audits in accordance with our legislated mandate
- various investigations and reviews of these matters conducted by both the council and other integrity agencies
- actions taken to address previous audit findings since 2018, including the winding up of certain controlled entities.
In conducting our audits, we seek to identify weaknesses in internal control and financial management practices and make recommendations to management to address these weaknesses. We have previously reported identified deficiencies in internal control and financial management practices to management of the council and its controlled entities in accordance with the requirements of the Auditor-General Act 2009. We also followed up on recommendations made to ensure agreed actions were implemented.
Under section 53 of the Auditor-General Act 2009, we are prevented from disclosing information obtained during an audit that is not publicly available. While we report publicly through our reports to parliament, these reports include our findings, conclusions, and recommendations, but do not include detailed transactional information. Public reporting of our detailed findings is the responsibility of management and may be subject to other applicable legislation such as the Local Government Act 2009 and the Information Privacy Act 2009.