Establishing stakeholders’ reporting requirements

Lines of reporting

Lines of reporting to and from the public inquiry’s stakeholders need to be established at an early stage. It is likely that the financial or corporate services directorate of the sponsoring department will be responsible for historic resource accounting and the settlement of bills and the inquiry should ensure that a cost centre and an appropriate account code structure are allocated to it. This should be designed in such a way as to meet the needs of both the sponsoring department and the inquiry. It may be advantageous to seek to second a member of staff who has an understanding of the workings of the department.

However, as it is unlikely that a public inquiry will have access to the sponsoring department’s accounting system, due to issues of independence and security, the public inquiry needs to define systems that track and record its expense; measure actual financial performance against projected levels of spend, scrutinising and analysing any major variances and, in particular, to establish a forecast that may potentially extend over a number of years to the end of the programme. Without access to the sponsoring department’s accounting system the process of accounting for monthly accruals and prepayments is potentially difficult, as the public inquiry cannot, with any great degree of certainty, establish which invoices submitted have been processed and which have not. It is therefore wise to agree a timetable setting a date after which items will be assumed not to be processed by the sponsoring department.

This issue, and others such as costs controlled centrally by the sponsoring department (which may include pay costs and possibly premise or security costs), demonstrates the importance of properly reconciling reports produced by the sponsoring department and reflecting over/under accruals accurately in respect on the on-going forecast.

It is necessary for the Secretary to establish the reporting requirements of the Chairman and Panel and of the sponsoring department. For instance whilst the Secretary must have detail of, and control over, each individual line of expense, the principals may require reporting only at a higher level, supported by a narrative commentary. This can be effected either through proprietary accounting software or through a series of spreadsheets of greater or lesser complexity dependant upon the structure and requirements of the inquiry and the detail of the reporting that is produced by the sponsoring department itself. An example template of a forecast spreadsheet that has been successfully used by a public inquiry is appended. Individual transactions are recorded on monthly detail sheets and can be supplemented by transactions centrally processed by the sponsoring department, such as pay costs, and for an end of month accrual/prepayment figure. These are compared to current and previous forecast figures on separate worksheets which read through to a high level reporting format. This spreadsheet is included for illustrative purposes only and each inquiry is likely to have discrete reporting and accounting requirements.

Examples of high level reporting generated from spreadsheets have been appended for illustrative purposes. Typically these can be supported by a narrative commentary and submitted monthly by the secretariat team, thus ensuring that both the Chairman and sponsoring department are fully apprised of the current financial forecast and of any issues that might affect its ongoing accuracy. The secretariat and legal teams should work closely together to ensure that the plans and requirements of the latter are adequately resourced in the projections of the former.

As HM Government now aim to make payment to all suppliers within 10 days, the public inquiry must ensure that it has adequate resources to check, process and authorise all incoming invoices speedily and efficiently.

It is extremely important that links are established with the sponsoring departments procurement unit to ensure that Government and EC rules on competitive tendering are adhered to and best practice, for instance in the use of framework agreements, is followed. Strictly speaking, as they have no legal persona, public inquiries theoretically should not enter into contracts in their own right but instead draw on existing agreements that the sponsoring department has set in place wherever possible. In practice however, the Secretary will often enter into contractual or quasi-contractual arrangements. Regardless of their origination, no arrangements should extend beyond the planned end date of the public inquiry.