Issue - meetings

10.1     The Committee considered a report on the East Sussex Pension Fund Internal Audit Strategy.

10.2     The Committee RESOLVED to approve the Internal Audit Strategy for the East Sussex Pension Fund.

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68.1.      The Board considered a report containing the draft East Sussex Pension Fund Internal Audit Strategy and two recently completed Internal Audit reports on the ESPF.

68.2.      Danny Simpson (DS), Principal Auditor, said that the current strategy was three years old and it was felt necessary that a new Internal Audit Strategy for the ESPF needed to be developed that could be applied to the two sovereign organisations in Orbis (East Sussex County Council and Surrey County Council) that are responsible for managing pension funds, subject to the approval of their respective committees. The strategy was currently a draft at the consultation stage. DS said that the main change from the existing strategy was the addition of an audit of the ACCESS pooling process. He said that it was prudent to have this as a separate audit for now but as it became part of business as usual it may be subsumed into the more general governance and investments audit. He confirmed that it was proposed that the other audits would carry on as before.

68.3.      The Chair observed that Pensions Regulator requires that pension funds hold 11 common data sets for all scheme members. He said it would be useful for internal audit to carry out an audit of these data sets to confirm whether or not they adhered to the Pensions Regulator’s requirements. Nigel Chilcott (NC), Senior Audit Manager, agreed that Internal Audit would look into including regulatory compliance as an area for audit. 

68.4.      Councillor Brian Redman (BR) asked whether the internal audit team audited the whole of Orbis and how costs were shard between the two sovereign organisations comprising Orbis.  NC said that the Internal Audit Strategy would be for the East Sussex Pension Fund (of which Brighton & Hove City Council is a member) and that there would be a very similar, but separate Strategy for Surrey’s pension fund.

68.5.      Ian Gutsell (IG), Chief Finance Officer explained that there is an integrated internal audit team for Orbis. All members of this team work under the Orbis banner but are employed by their sovereign organisations. It is an integrated service that delivers the internal audit function across the three organisations and has an integrated pooled budget; the team then charges respective individual organisations for their internal audit work. This means that there is no additional cost for any of the three organisations for internal audit compared to if internal audit was provided in-house, and the pooled arrangements in fact deliver some efficiency savings. All three organisations’ section 151 officers sign off their respective internal audit strategies.

68.6.      BR asked  ...  view the full minutes text for item 68