News

NAO warns of ‘errors and uncertainties’ in academy accounts

Government policy
The National Audit Office (NAO) has warned of an “inherent set of risks” in the Department for Education’s financial management of academies because it has no direct control over the schools’ spending.

The DfE has been working flat-out to consolidate the spending of 2,823 academies for 2012/13 into its own accounts.

Last week, the government’s spending watchdog signed off the accounts, but issued a qualifying statement citing “a number of errors and uncertainties”.

It warns of the dangers of the DfE being accountable for financial activity over which it has no direct control.

A statement from the NAO said that comptroller and auditor general Amyas Morse had “qualified his opinion on the accounts of the Department for Education and the Education Funding Agency (EFA) on a number of grounds”.

One issue was that academies produce accounts to August 31, while the DfE’s year-end is March 31. As such, the DfE and EFA hypothesised that financial data for the year to the end of August 2012 was a fair approximation for the equivalent to March 31, 2013.

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