TVCA misses audit deadline for second year
Tees Valley Combined AuthorityA regional authority will miss the deadline to complete an audit of its financial accounts for the second year running.
Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) said it would not meet the government set deadline of 27 February to publish its audited accounts for the 2024-2025 financial year.
It follows the authority missing the deadline for the previous financial year, for which it has yet to publish its books.
A spokesperson for TVCA - which is chaired by Tees Valley Conservative Mayor Ben Houchen - said the priority was to ensure its accounts were "accurate, robust, and fully compliant with statutory requirements".
The combined authority is a partnership of five local councils made up of Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and Stockton-on-Tees.
In a report dated 11 February, auditors EY raised several issues it had faced when attempting to audit the authority's accounts.
This included an "inability to locate key accounting records" as well as finding some loans issued by TVCA were unsigned, which meant there was a lack of clarity about their "legal enforceability".
A TVCA spokesperson said "significant progress" had been made in dealing with issues raised by the auditors but there remained "outstanding questions" which it was continuing to address.
"This does not mean that there are still material errors, but that further technical assessment is required," they said.
'Specialist technical advice'
At a TVCA audit and governance meeting on Friday, the body's interim finance director Jo Moore said missing the government's audit deadline was "not great" but said: "We did everything we absolutely could to meet that statutory backstop."
She said "expert advice" from accounting firm Grant Thornton had been brought in to help it with its books, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
A TVCA spokesperson said the "specialist technical advice" was not due to new or additional issues found in its accounts.
The body said it remained committed to the "highest standards of financial management and governance" and would "continue to work transparently and diligently to meet our audit obligations".
A spokesperson also said the organisation had put in place "significant measures" to strengthen its financial reporting processes and would continue to improve this.
There is a nationwide backlog of local authority and local body accounts which have not been audited.
In 2024, the government introduced statutory deadlines in an attempt to clear this backlog.
