THE 150 per cent rise in the cost of auditors who scrutinise council accounts was slated as “almost immoral” by a West Devon councillor.

Members of West Devon Borough Council’s hub committee thought the £52,000 they already pay was bad enough especially as the audit was behind schedule, but that will rise to £132,000 next year.

They were told there was a national shortage of external auditors and only 27 per cent of councils had had their accounts signed off for 2021/22 with many waiting for three years for accounts to be checked.

Although West Devon is one of the councils which is currently up-to-date, its audit for 2022/23 is delayed, putting “considerable pressure” on the finance department.

Leader of the council Cllr Mandy Ewings (Ind, Tavistock South West) said: “It’s almost immoral charging these prices. It’s really, really not good. 

“It comes up every year at the LGA (Local Government Association) that they can’t get auditors to do the job, but I don’t know why as obviously the money is quite good.”

Cllr Caroline Mott (Con, Bridestowe) said: “While it’s good to know we are in the 27 per cent, it is really disappointing to note that we will not achieve the same for this year, considering the amount of money we pay the auditors to compile our accounts and the extra workload on officers.”

Cllr Mark Renders said everyone is getting “appalling” service and Dartmoor National Park is also concerned. 

He wants local authorities to band together to make their feelings known.

The council’s director of strategic finance, Lisa Buckle, said last year’s audit was not going to start until January, but the council has been successful in moving that forward to November.

“We made the case to our auditors that we have one finance team between two authorities (West Devon and South Hams), we would be trying to do two budgets and two sets of audits during a very, very busy time in January and we felt that their timetable was not taking that into account.”

She said the deadline is the end of this month and normally the audit would be done in the summer which is not as busy for the finance team.

The decision to increase fees was made by Public Sector Audit Appointments Ltd (PSAA) nationally, and the council can do little about it, but it would make the points to its partner Grant Thornton, the accountancy firm which currently holds the auditing contract. 

Next year it will be Bishop Fleming.

The PSAA said it had sufficient capacity to meet local authorities’ needs but is calling on government support to “mitigate the very significant increase in audit fees”.

The council was told that recruitment and retention of staff in the audit profession is a big issue.

West Devon Borough Council has an underspend of £79,000 for the year 2022/23 which equates to one per cent of its net budget which will go into reserves.