Recommendation 7

Accounting officers are personally responsible for making sure that the organisation they lead delivers against the four standards relevant to the organisation’s governance, decisionmaking and financial management.17 The standards apply to all spending decisions and types of programmes, and it is good practice to complete an assessment for decisions categorised as “novel and contentious”.18 HM Treasury acknowledged that the range of programmes government manages is broad and AO assessments for, for example, policy and infrastructure programmes require different expertise. It told us that departments such as the Department for Transport and the Ministry of Defence, which have many programmes on the Government Major Projects Portfolio, were good at AO assessments compared to other departments. HM Treasury told us that it was working on getting those departments which have experience of completing and publishing AO assessments to work with those which do not.19