Processes
Government departments do not often have the same focus on maintaining the integrity of the books that commercial organisations have.
The lack of strong financial management discipline means that information in financial systems is less reliable and sometimes contradictory to information held off-system – this means there is not a generally agreed single version of the truth which often undermines the ability of the top management team to control and divert resources to meet corporate level priorities. Audit takes longer or is weaker, and places far less reliance on testing the integrity of systems with far more substantive work having to be undertaken. Lack of common approaches to data definitions and categories of expenditure mean that it is difficult to use data analytics without extensive work to cleanse data.
Cross cutting functional disciplines are generally weaker than in businesses with less emphasis placed on compliance. There are rarely sanctions for individual managers who fail to maintain mandated corporate standards for financial management information and practices. There is also little enforcement of information management discipline at all levels with no action taken against business areas that hold information off-system or which fail to ensure that a single version of data exists in both corporate and local systems.
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