Chamber and committees

That is great. Willie Coffey, who joins us online, has a question.

Auditor General, one of the striking things in your opening statement was the fact that the auditor issued a disclaimer of opinion on SEPA’s annual report and accounts for 2020-21 and, therefore, the accounts have not been signed off. You used the word “unusual” for that choice, and it is extremely unusual. You also said that that was principally because of unsatisfactory records or evidence around a notional £42 million of income from fees. Who takes the decision to put in that disclaimer and not sign off the accounts? Is it Joanne Brown at Grant Thornton, or is it you, the Auditor General, at Audit Scotland? At what level is that decision taken?

I presume that that means that you—I do not know whether it is just you or a team—have to work closely with SEPA’s finance people and audit committee to ensure that things remain on track and go at the fastest pace that can be done while retaining the integrity of the accounting systems. Are you devoting a lot of your time to developing the situation from where it has been?

Thanks, Willie. I will come back to you before the end of the session for the other area of questioning that you have.

Craig Hoy wants to explore SEPA’s response, both immediate and in the medium term, to the crisis and attack when it happened.

Thank you for clarifying that. That is helpful.

You have inferred this to an extent, but one thing that comes out in the report is that temporary arrangements have had to be put in place for things such as paying staff salaries and paying suppliers. From your auditing perspective, were you satisfied that those temporary financial arrangements were sound?

Thank you, Willie—I will come back to you.

For me, there is a stand-out feature of the report. Over recent weeks, we have looked at section 22 reports on organisations that are quite small and have fairly limited resources, budgets and staffing levels. Here, we have two premier agencies of central Government—Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council—which have a combined budget each year of £2 billion and more of public money. Despite that, the story in the report is that, going back to 2016-17, they have failed to agree, and therefore things have not happened. That is quite staggering.

The report infers that the Scottish Government has failed to provide leadership to address and rectify the situation. There have been a few reheated attempts to set up various committees and bodies to co-ordinate things, all of which—according to the report that has been laid before the committee—seem, largely, to have failed. Why do you think that is, Auditor General?

I turn to the skills alignment actions, which are, as you say, the principal focus of the report that we are considering. The report notes that in 2018-19 the Scottish Government said that it planned to issue the same strategic skills guidance, through letters of guidance, to the boards of Skills Development Scotland and the Scottish Funding Council in order to support delivery of the enterprise and skills strategic board’s strategic plan, once that was published. Has consistent and complementary guidance ever been issued by the Scottish Government to those agencies?

Thank you very much, Auditor General. We have a large number of questions, but before we go to them, I remind everyone that, to aid broadcasting, it would be helpful if members could direct their questions to a particular member of the team. I also say to Stephen Boyle that if someone on his team other than whoever has been invited to respond wishes to come in and add something to our evidence gathering, they should put an R in the chat function. We will pick that up and bring them in.

Sharon Dowey has a number of questions.

I think that there might be some problem with the cameras for Douglas Black and Gordon Smail—[Interruption.] I now see Gordon—please join us.

I am sure that we will consider that. I will bring Willie Coffey in before we begin the last lap of our evidence.