 Yn 2016, mae'n dweud y sefyllfa 5 o'r Cymysgol Cymysgol Cymysgol i'r orthwyr. Rwy'n dechrau'n gwneud â'r ac yn y cwmpasiddau a'r cyfnodau ym yn yma, ac yn ymwybodaeth yn ymdweud y cymysgol cymysgol, yn cyfnoddau'n gwneud yma. Rwy'n dechrau'n gwneud i fynd i'r rwyng gael ei fod yn siaradau yn ysgolau cyfnoddau. Yr un iddyn nhw'n gweithio y bydd yma i'ch ymdweithio ar y prif, ac sefydlu'r cymysgol to decide whether to take item 6 and 7 in private. Are members content? Yes. Thank you. Two, declaration of interests. Members will be invited to declare any irrelevant interest, starting with myself. I will simply say I have nothing additional to my already declared interests in my register of interests. Yes, similarly, I have nothing to declare beyond what's already been disclosed. I have nothing additional to declare. Nothing to declare? Nothing to declare beyond my register. Thank you very much. I move to item 3 on the agenda, which is the choice of chair. The commission will choose a chair and I will seek nominations for the position of chair. Is there a second one? Happy to second. Are there any other nominations? In that case, I ask the commission to agree that Colin Beattie will be chosen as chair of the Scottish Commission for Public Audit, are we agreed? Yes. Thank you very much. I move on to the choice of deputy chair. The commission will choose a deputy chair and I will seek nominations for that position. I would propose John Lamont. I'll second that. We have a proposal of a seconder. Are there any other nominations? Congratulations John, you've taken on an onerous position there. Thank you very much and we'll go straight on then to item 5 on the agenda. We'll suspend us for a couple of minutes while the witnesses come in. We move to item 5 on the agenda, which relates to taking evidence on Audit Scotland's annual report on accounts for 2015-16 and members have a copy of the annual report on their meeting papers along with the auditor's report on the accounts. I would like to welcome Ian Leitch, chair of the board of Audit Scotland, and Ian's company by Caroline Gardner, the Auditor General, Diane McGiffen, chief operating officer and Russell Frith, assistant auditor general. Can I invite, firstly, Ian Leitch to make a short introductory statement on what I'm going to say as we're on a very tight schedule today, because obviously we have to finish to release members to be in the chamber by 2 o'clock, so I would ask any responses to questioning and so on to be fairly tight. Ian. Thank you, convener, and congratulations on your re-election. I assume that that's appropriate to say. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to make a brief opening statement. I'm pleased to be able to introduce to the Audit Scotland annual report on accounts, my first as chair, and look forward to working with your new commission. Our role as a board, as you know, is to support the auditor general in her work and also the Accounts Commission, which deals with other aspects of particularly local government and some other areas. We're doing this to help to ensure that public money is spent properly and effectively on the key public services on which we all rely. I'm pleased also to welcome Professor Russell Griggs, whom your previous commission appointed to our board. As a board, we and our Audit Committee have reviewed these accounts and considered reports from our internal auditors. These are mentioned on page 24 of the annual report. The annual report makes reference to significant political economic changes and challenges over the last year for public bodies. Those reinforce the need for us to continue to give a sharp focus and be able to adapt. We are making sure that we organise ourselves to be flexible enough to respond to the challenges ahead. We already have a strong organisation to build on, and I thank the auditor general, Diane Russell and all the staff for the work that they have done and the commitment that they have shown throughout the year. Looking forward, there are substantial new financial powers for the Scottish Parliament that will bring even greater policy choices over tax spending and additional responsibilities for us. Indeed, we highlight this on page 9 of our annual report. We have been discussing the implications for Audit Scotland, all these new powers and any additional work that this implies. I'm pleased to say that Audit Scotland has actively been considering the practical implications of these developments, and we will be able to share our plans going forward when we present our budget proposals to the commission. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, depending on your timetable. Thank you, convener. I believe that Carolyn Gardner has a brief comment or two to make. Very briefly, Audit Scotland plays a vital role in helping me and the Accounts Commission to ensure that there is proper scrutiny of public money. Like all public bodies, we recognise that we need to continue to change, to improve and to demonstrate efficiencies. Our strategy for doing that is to set out under a stream of projects under the banner of becoming world class, and we're happy to talk more about how we're taking that forward. A key part of our work is in supporting the Scottish Parliament and especially the Public Audit Committee to subject public bodies to effective scrutiny. At the same time as driving change in our own organisation, I believe that we've delivered our call work successfully over the last year, producing over 300 annual audit reports, 17 performance audits, and all of the accompanying work in supporting the Parliament and its committees. Some of the themes highlighted in the report before you today include the implementation of the Parliament's new financial powers, managing public sector reform and transforming public services. I'm grateful to my colleagues for all their hard work and commitment over the year for what has been challenging and productive for all of us, and we will, of course, chair do our best to answer the commission's questions. Thank you, Colin. Let me begin by asking the first question, which is on page 6 of the annual report, you state that 96 per cent of central government and 21 further education audit reports were completed by the respective due dates. Can you confirm that the 4 per cent of audits that were not completed on time what the reasons were for these particular delays? Certainly, chair, yes. Two of them, the Scottish Consolidated Fund and Skills Development Scotland, were just three days late and that was due to timing difficulties around the audit committees and the sign off of the audits themselves and really not significant in any way. The third was the Scottish Police Authority and you'll be aware as a member of the public audit committee that I've expressed particular concern about the financial management systems and controls in the SPA that led to a much more significant delay in the completion of that audit and indeed to a significant increase in the audit fee that we had to charge for that work. How much extra was that audit fee? The extra fee, Russell. Can you help me with the additional fee for that work? For memory, I think it was £40,000. Not insignificant. I think probably the main thing I'm trying to get reassurance on is that the delays were not caused at any point by lack of resources. No, in neither case, what was that the case? As I say, two were very short delays and they were really just timing and scheduling difficulties. The SPA was due to problems within the police authority, not within the audit process, but thank you for your concern about the resources that we have available. We weren't promising you more. On page 10 of the annual report, Audit Scotland advises that there were seven auditor opinions qualified this year to and further education, one in central government and four in charities. Can I ask, is this a normal number of qualified audit reports in any given year, or is this untypically high, and are there any resource implications for Audit Scotland, which may result from qualified audit reports? I'll ask Russell to come in with the detail for those seven bodies in a moment. In broad terms, I think it is fairly typical. We haven't yet seen an increase in the number of qualified or modified audit opinions because of the pressure on public bodies, but it obviously is a risk that we are very conscious of, especially as we head into the next Scottish parliamentary budget round and for us a new round of five-year audit appointments. Russell, can you amplify the reasons for those particular bodies? Yes, I can indeed. There were, firstly, to say that none of the qualifications related to the true and fair view of the financial statements. Two colleges had qualified opinions on their remuneration report due to certain pension information not being included, which it was required for the first time to be. The police authority, the modified opinion there, was in relation to keeping or not keeping proper accounting records during the year in relation to fixed assets. The issue was eventually resolved post the year end for the accounts, but during the year there was an issue. The other four were local authority charities where their opinions were qualified because the governing documents could not be traced. To give you a bit of context there, these charities have been around for, in some cases, over 100 years through many local government reorganisations and were only just being required under the charities legislation to be formally audited. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the records for some of the very old and small charities were not complete going right back to the beginning. My question relates to the section on your report entitled Improving our Performance on page 15, in which you state that you will be developing a new fees strategy that will be implemented during 2016. Could you give us an update on that work, given the interests of the previous commission in this area? We have carried out a consultation with all our client groups. We have looked at the overall fee arrangements. We are introducing transparency to that. Going forward, there will be no cross-sector subsidies, in other words, each sector health local government will pay their own. There may be, within that, some adjustments between local government bodies. All the detail of that will be supplied to you in the budget submissions that we will be making to you for the next round, which will be shortly when we have your timetable submitting all the documents. I did give an undertaking last year before the commission, as the convener will recollect, that this work would be undertaken during this year. It has been done. Can I ask a follow-up question? I used to be a solicitor in private practice. I still am. Lucky you. I am now a reform character, I like to think. We were charging clients fees. We had to justify the fee by giving a breakdown of the hours, the chargeable rate for each solicitor involved in that work. How do you work out the basis of that up until this point before those changes come in? How have you worked out the fees that you are charging up until now? I will take the detail on that. The fees paid by the audited bodies are an amalgam of several things. One is the direct cost of carrying out the annual financial audit. There is a sharing out of some central costs, which are a portion between the bodies, according to the size of the audit fee largely. The fees for the individual audits are worked out on the basis of what we think the risk profile is for a body of that size in that particular part of the public sector, so differently for local government, health, central government. We set what we call an indicative or now expected fee for that audit. That is based on our overall central intelligence. The auditor and the audited body then agree the precise fee based on the individual circumstances. If some of our expectations around, for example, a good level of internal control, good accounts preparation are not being met, the auditor may agree a final fee that is above that expected level. Page 18 relates to staff numbers, in particular the rising number of staff departures annually. Can you confirm that business cases are in place to demonstrate value for money in the funding of staff departures, given that it is increasing year on year? Can you give us an idea of what sort of forward planning goes into that, those rising costs? We have a voluntary early release agreement policy and practice. It was approved by our remuneration committee and we report annually on the savings from previous early releases that have been made. Each individual case has to have a business case and it has to generate savings over a three-year period. We report annually on each case to ensure that the savings are continuing to be made. That is reported to the remuneration committee annually, so it is very tightly managed. We report very clearly on it because we are very keen to demonstrate that we are achieving good value for money. Because we have a no compulsory redundancy policy in reshaping the organisation, we have had two possibilities available to us. One is to make clear choices when we have ordinary turnover and levers from the organisation to decide whether we should continue to fill that pulse, whether we want to restructure it, and we have run over the past few years, but not every year, a voluntary early release scheme, where we are looking to seek agreement with colleagues over their departure. That has helped us fundamentally reshape the organisation and has been, as I say, one of the two options available for us to do that. You are quite confident that you are getting value for money from accepting these voluntary redundancies? Very much so. The tariff that is in place for the voluntary early release agreement ensures that we are managing the costs to the public purse and the benefits to the public purse very carefully. John, back to you. My next question relates to the payment to suppliers, which you referenced in page 20 of your report. You stated that 84 per cent of trade invoices were paid within 10 days, which is a very slight fall from 87 per cent, which was the previous year's performance. Can you give us any specific reasons why there has been this very marginal fall in payment rates? I do not think that there are any particular reasons for it. It is simply the changing pattern of supplies and invoices coming through. We do monitor it carefully. It is part of the quarterly performance monitoring that goes to the Audit Scotland board for their attention. If the trend continues, we will drill further into it, but the evidence for last year suggested that it was just a normal business variation. Page 21 of the annual report is an underspend by Audit Scotland of £834,000 during 2015-16, which equates to 8.4 per cent of the total resource requirement that was approved by Parliament. I would like to understand whether Audit Scotland has a target for underspends, as 8.4 per cent does seem relatively high. That is a very good question, Ms Johnston. The first thing to say is that we aim to underspend. If we overspend the budget that is approved by Parliament and the SCPA, our accounts are automatically qualified, and you will understand that that is very bad news for me as the Auditor General, so we go to some lengths to make sure that does not happen. Of the 834 shown in the report, 125 relates directly to our capital budget, and that reflects the savings that we were able to make on the contract for fitting out our new offices at Westport. That was a large capital contract last year. We made some significant savings, and that will be returned to the consolidated fund as unused. Within the revenue part of our budget, the underspend was about £700,000. We can give you a more detailed breakdown if it would be useful, but the two big things contributing to that were, first of all, higher than budgeted fee income. Fee income was about £390,000 higher than expected because of extra work required for things like the Scottish Police Authority, but also new bodies coming on in the year and other movements at the margin. The second was a reduction in our property running costs. You will see a reference in the annual report to the cost of the dilapidations that we had to pay to our landlord in George Street being lower than the provision that we have made. That released about £270,000 to our revenue account, again that we could not have budgeted for in advance. We would aim to keep our underspend lower than that in normal circumstances, but the property move last year particularly made it higher than we would have planned for. If you could give us a breakdown of that in writing so that we can just public it. There was obviously unexpected savings and perhaps unexpected income there. Is there an opportunity to recycle some of that underspend back into the public sector at a time of incredibly tight budgets? Yes, we do not have the ability to hold reserves at all. If we underspend our budget, there are two broad options. One, if it is significant and it relates to the audit work that we carry out directly, we can make a refund of fees to audited bodies and we have done that in the past. The other option is that it is simply returned to the Scottish Consolidated Fund and is available for recycling. We cannot hold reserves, so we are aiming to balance our budget each year on the notes of the article that is approved by Parliament for us. Myself and the board members, because we are conscious that when we ask, as we will be in the next few weeks, when we come before you for the next budget round, we are asking for something which top slices the consolidated fund. We are very conscious that if we ask for too much, it is a denial that year for some other body having a resource. It is all very well having an underspend in the year, and we have to have some margin there. We are taking a very sharp pencil to this, and we are looking at it to try to make sure that the margin of underspend is reduced year on year so that it does not, at the point that you make, rather validly deny to other sectors that money is up front as opposed to year end. I follow-up with another question. We are told in the annual report of the section about us that the aim of a world class audit organisation is about identifying risks. If we want to improve the use of public money, if you ever look at anything like the collapse of Scottish Coal, for example, exposed a series of woefully inadequate insurance and bond schemes set up with local authorities that might have a significant impact on public finance, is that the sort of risk that Audit Scotland would be looking at? It is certainly one of the sorts of risks that we are looking at, and you are right that the open-cast mining claims that we saw, first of all in East Ayrshire, were a wake-up call for everybody, I think, about some of the longer-term liabilities that might be around that people were not paying attention to. We have looked closely at related claims for open-cast mining waste disposal sites, potentially where there is a liability longer term that will have to be met in making sure that those risks are in place. One of the things that I have been making a priority as Audit a General is making sure that public bodies financial reporting is as clear as it can be about what those risks are, and that goes all the way from local authorities through to the Scottish Government itself in terms of making sure that it is transparent what long-term liabilities and long-term commitments are. We aim to do that both bottom up through our knowledge of individual authorities and public bodies and top down thinking about an issue like open-cast coal mining and what the parallels might be for other public bodies around the place. We are always keen to hear from people with an interest or a specialist insight into things that might not be getting the attention that they deserve at the moment. I would like to ask about benefits and kind. On page 31, the annual report states that a benefit and kind provided for the director of audit services has increased by 18 per cent from £3,800 to £4,500. Can you please explain the precise nature of this benefit and kind and its increase of 18 per cent from last year? Further, can Audit Scotland explain the governance arrangements in place for granting such additional employee benefits? The benefit and kind that is referred to on the table relates to the provision of a leased car for the employee concerned. We have a leased car scheme that is available to a number of our staff who are required to travel for their work. You will understand that auditing 220 bodies across Scotland is important that we have staff who are mobile and are unable to get to where they need to be. Diane, I think, can talk you through the detail of the governance for that and the increase for the individual that you are seeing here in the annual report. I think that the increase relates to the expiry of the routine replacement of the car. Cars are provided on a four-year lease period. We have done a lot of work over the past few years to reduce the overall cost of the car leasing arrangements that we have, and those have contributed to some efficiencies that we have made. We currently have 105 lease cars in the scheme. They are part of the terms and conditions of employees who are working on front-line audit work. The membership of the car scheme has shrunk over the past few years. As you will see in our carbon reporting, we are consciously looking at effectively managing the mileage and so on that people do. The car scheme itself has been in existence for some time. We are currently looking at the wider pay terms and conditions of colleagues, and the car scheme is in the mix of those discussions. Correct me if I am wrong, Diana. I do not know if the report is detailed on the other staff who have benefits in kind so that we can see the other cars and if there has been such a large increase of 18 per cent. Can you give me any idea of how many cars we are talking about and if the replacement is all total 18 per cent to see if that is an average kind of increase? I can certainly, in terms of the detail of that question, be very happy to come back to you and supply that. The presentation of the benefit and kind in the table here is part of the accounting requirements. Those requirements apply to the management team members of audit Scotland or other public bodies. There is not an accounting requirement for us to present that information for all staff, but we would be very happy to give that to you. I think that, as I mentioned, we have 105 cars at the moment. In total, our lease commitments are total about 970,000. I can break that down to you. There are some people at the beginning of leases and some people coming to the end of them. Overall, the contract we have for the supply of the vehicles, we retendered within the past 12 months and we are bringing down the cost of that, but we have not run off all of the older contracts that we had, but I can certainly provide you with more information if that would help. It is useful that you can give us more information on the car scheme so that we can see if 18 per cent, because 18 per cent seems like quite a huge increase year on year in terms of benefit and kind. What is the decision making process behind signing off that 18 per cent increase? The contribution that Audit Scotland makes to any car is fixed, I cannot recall the current value of it. I think that it is fixed at about £3,000 to Russell, if you know the detail of it. The cost to Audit Scotland is absolutely fixed. Individuals may request additional features on cars that we do not pay for, but the individual is paying for. In accounting terms, Russell, I do not know if you have a better definition of benefit and kind in relation to cars that might help. In relation to the cars, the value that is recorded there is the HMRC benefiting kind value for the car, not necessarily the precise cash cost to Audit Scotland. The contribution that Audit Scotland makes is a flat rate, regardless of who the employee is. There is one scheme for all employees, and there is a flat rate contribution from Audit Scotland. I will ask you to write to us and give us a little bit of detail about that. I have another question for me. Page 48 on the annual account shows an increase of £451,000, which is a 68 per cent increase in the costs of the local government retirement benefits scheme. Can you explain please the background to the cost and the reason for the significant year-on-year increase? Russell is our expert in these very complicated pension accounting issues. Audit Scotland is a member of two different public sector schemes. The vast majority of our staff are in members of the local government scheme, which is a funded scheme. We happen to be in the Lothian pension scheme. A small number of staff remain in the principal civil service scheme. There is a significant difference in the accounting bit for the two. For the civil service scheme, we simply record the employer contributions in our accounts as the cost of pensions. However, for the local government scheme, we have to include the full actuarial value of the pension benefit in the year. That goes up and down in a quite volatile way, depending on movements in assumptions around discount rates, longevity and salary increases. The cost of our pension scheme is quite volatile. The volatility is a non-cash cost. In this case, for 2016, you see a £1.1 million adjustment for retirement benefit scheme costs. That is the additional cost that the actuary believes is the full cost of providing pensions in the year, the pension contributions in the year, above the amount that we actually pay into the scheme. Over the life of the scheme, that number evens out to zero, and indeed in some years has been a negative number. However, it is a non-cash cost, and it is to do with the accounting for funded schemes, which we are required to follow. Look at page 54 of the report. The actual expenditure shows a significant underspend and accommodation costs travel on subsistence. Are there specific reasons for that? Is it just efficient budgeting, or are there particular reasons, given the fact that the number of audits and so on being done have not reduced? In relation to accommodation, this is starting to see the benefits of the move from two offices to one that we made last November, but is also the benefit of agreeing lower dilapidations on our existing previous buildings than we had originally provided for. Although rent and rates took quite a jump, was that because you were paying duplicate rent? We were double running costs for part of the 2015-16 year. Will you have known that when you budgeted in 2015? No, scrub that. It doesn't make sense. The other thing is that there has been quite a big increase in information technology between two years, which is 335 moving to 461. It is quite a substantial increase. Yes, that is again partly related to the move and some of the installation of new equipment, new cabling in the new office. It is also we have improved, increased the resilience and backup facilities for our IT equipment. We used to keep it within our George Street offices, but now having moved to one office, that is no longer a sensible arrangement. We now have off-site backup facilities in place. In the same year, the cost of some of our software licences that we need to operate the core systems also increased. On page 14, I was rather curious about the section on audit quality, where you say that audit quality is independently reviewed by other UK audit agencies. How does that work? A couple of approaches to ensuring the quality of our audit work, given its absolute fundamental importance to what we do. First of all, each of the audit groups within Audit Scotland is required to have its own internal peer review process in place. We also have external peer review arrangements with our colleagues in the National Audit Office, the Wales Audit Office and the Northern Ireland Audit Office, where they will do cold reviews, particularly of performance audits after the event, to ensure that we are meeting professional standards and to make suggestions for improvement. Alongside all of that, Russell's team has got responsibility for providing assurance to me, to the Accounts Commission and to the board about the quality of all of the audit work that is carried out on our behalf. The firms that we appoint are subject to regulation either by ICAS or ICAW. For the in-house team that is carrying out annual audits, we have had a contract in place for the last few years with ICAS to review a sample of audits to provide us with that assurance that they are complying with the international standards on auditing and the ethical standards that we comply with. So what tools do these other agencies use to assess you? We all have our own audit management and performance audit management frameworks that we use, and actually those frameworks themselves learn from each other to make sure that we're applying best practice. So it's more a process assessment? Absolutely, they will also give feedback if they think that our conclusions could have gone further or that we could have benefited from a different approach to analysing data, but really they're making sure that we've complied with the project management and the audit frameworks that we have in place. On page 15, you say under securing world-class audit bullet point one that you're developing a new code of audit practice for public audit in Scotland. That sounds quite a big undertaking, and presumably we're not doing it in isolation that we're taking ideas and so on from elsewhere. How are you approaching this? Russell, do you want to answer that? Yes, indeed. The new code has been issued because it applies from the start of the new audit appointments, which will be kicking off next week. We've had a code in place for many years. We revise it every five years. The idea is to have a public statement of what our expectations of audit are. In revising it, yes, we look at the similar codes that are in place around the rest of the UK. We look at what we're trying to achieve from audit, where we're trying to perhaps lead the way, go further than might be required in, for say, a company's act audit. So, particularly where we are going beyond a pure financial statements audit into the wider scope of public audits around governance, financial sustainability and so on, the code is the place where we set out our high-level expectations in those areas. Would it be possible to see a copy? Yes, it's not something that naturally you browse in the course of your day, but it would be something that might be of interest to the members. On page 21, you've got other finance income. I'm just a little curious on this. It says that it's the expected interest income from local government pension scheme assets less the interest payable. Maybe I could get a bit more information on that, because it's unusual to see anything to do with pensions. It comes out—I'm not sure if that's positive or not, actually. That is the place in a set of financial statements where we're now required to include the actuarial assessments of the interest that we would notionally receive on our share of the pension funds assets. Notwithstanding that the pension fund assets are already invested elsewhere and have their own income. I'm struggling with that. Required Accounting Treatment Chair, we find it complicated as well, as you will know from working with us on this issue over a number of years, but that's the way we're required to account for it in the annual reports and accounts. Okay, there's not much to say about that. It is what it is, I suppose. Now, the fee strategy that you're going to be bringing forward to us with the budget. Governance, which is obviously something that the Scottish Commission—previous one and possibly this one—might be looking at. What are you actually doing to review your own governance at the moment? We have reviewed our standing orders and we've looked at the question of how our quorum is made up. The Auditor General and the Chairman of the Local Authority Accounts Commission are by statute members of the board, as you're aware, convener. There is a provision in our standing orders that stipulates that both have to be in attendance, otherwise the meeting is in quarat. There's a reason for that, going back some time, and that is to say that since the primary function of the Audit Scotland board is to ensure the supply of the services and staff required by both the Auditor General and the Local Authority Accounts Commission in order to discharge their statutory functions, that both of those representatives should be in attendance when any material matter is considered. It does pose potentially a difficulty in that if one is unable to attend for whatever reason, then we simply cannot deliberate any business, and that is something that we've considered. I did say to you some time ago that we would look at this question, we've had a long discussion on it, and what we are doing is saying that each person has to commit to a specific date to ensure that we are quarat. It doesn't take away the potential of someone being abducted for whatever reason, and taking away or falling under the proverbial number 22 bus that we could be in quarat. Nevertheless, there's a balance of issues here, and we've discussed it, and we consider the current arrangements for the time being should continue because they haven't proved a difficulty, but we are aware of the potential for difficulty. We want to ensure that the Auditor General and the Chairman of the Local Authority Accounts Commission are satisfied that their statutory interests are being protected by the way we operate. We did undertake to look at it. We have looked at it and we're staying with the existing arrangements for the C3 overcuture, but we are going to review this on an annual basis with all our standing orders. If there are practical difficulties, we shall try and deal with them, but that's the reason for it. More generally, convener, the board has pooned paying a great deal of attention to the implications of the Parliament's new financial powers, and more recently, the result of the EU referendum for Audit Scotland's work and the governance. We spent a day in September looking very specifically at the ways we work and making sure that we're equipped to do it. I think that we agree that we all think that it's fit for purpose at the moment and that we will continue to keep it under review, and if any matters come out of that process, that we should draw to your attention will certainly do that. Okay, thank you. Can I ask members of the Alison you've got? Can I just specifically on that last point? Do you have any particular reviews on Audit Scotland's role in the new fiscal framework? Yes, we've done a lot of work on this over the last couple of years, initially in relation to the Scotland Act 2012, which is just now fully in place, and obviously since then on the Scotland Act 2016 and any further changes that come from the EU referendum. We've published a number of papers, including a briefing paper that we produced just yesterday on the new financial powers, which sets out questions for all of us, the Government, Parliament and Audit Scotland, about the way some of that will work. We do expect it to lead to some additional audit work, not least through the establishment of things like the new social security agency, the need to make sure that the Scottish Parliament has assurance on taxes that are collected on its behalf by HMRC at a UK level, benefits that continue to be administered by DWP that interact with the social security powers here and the new Scottish Fiscal Commission, for example. Equally, we think that there's a role for us in helping the development of the financial information that's available to the Scottish Parliament in making decisions about the new tax and spending powers, so we'll continue to play that role. Indeed, I'm meeting here tomorrow with the budget review group to help shape some of those processes. We do expect it to have an impact on our work. It's too soon to say what it is, but the organisation and the board are very closely focused on what the implications might be for us in making sure that we're properly equipped to respond to them. A more specific event that might have an impact on planning in the shorter term is the late budget. Obviously, Westminster's later, we're going to be later. Will that have an impact on your work or ability to plan? Not so much in this year, I think, that at the moment most of our work does focus on the annual audit accounts at the end of a financial year. There's no doubt that it will cause difficulties for some of the bodies that we audit, some walls and others, and we'll have to look at how we work with them to minimise the impact of those difficulties. I think that our bigger interest is in making sure that the Parliament is able to put in place a budget process that really does give you time to scrutinise the proposals on tax and spending, to understand the choices that are implicit in that and to involve the wider public in some of that discussion. We're very keen to play our part in helping the development of that process. Do any other members have any questions that they would like to ask, witnesses? In that case, Ian, Colin, do you have anything you would like to add? We're fine, thank you very much. In that case, thank you very much for your evidence and attending. We look forward to working together over the next session. As agreed at the beginning of the meeting, we move into private.