Council Accounts delayed yet again

There is still no date for when the Warrington Borough Council 2017/18 Accounts will be signed off. The delay has been caused by a public objection concerning the treatment of the Council's investment in Redwood Bank. Our Finance spokesperson, Cllr Ian Marks, says:

This issue is raised at every meeting of the Audit and Corporate Governance Committee. It is a complex accounting matter and you need to be a qualified accountant to have any hope of understanding what is going on.

The problem is that we keep on being promised dates for the sign-off but these are never met. From the meeting last week, it now appears we are going backwards. An expert now has to be employed to give advice. We pressed for a new date for the sign-off but no date was forthcoming from the Auditors, Grant Thornton, or from senior Council officers. When the 2017/18 accounts are cleared we will then still have to wait for the 2018/19 accounts to be audited.

I am concerned that this long delay is not doing the reputation of the Council, or of Grant Thornton, any good. Although there may be perfectly innocent differences of view about accounting procedures, the public can be forgiven for thinking there is something fundamentally flawed in the Council's Bank investment. The sooner this problem is resolved the better.